Creating an INDEX

[hc1619]

This may seem a really dumb question, but anyway.

I have a dating site.. SQL DB. Got about 150,000 messages now in my "messages" table that members send to each other. Everything is still running OK so far. But I was looking through enterprise manager today and saw a thing to create an index.. on a field in a table...?? I already have a primary key field in each of my tables.. but what's this other "create an index" thing all about? Is it something to speed up the table.. etc? I would really like some clarification on this. Thanks.

 

[ESquared]

There are two kinds of indexes, clustered and nonclustered.

Clustered indexes use the pages of the actual database data as their index.

Nonclustered indexes have a separate 'table' just for the index data.

You can read about these topics in BOL, and you may want to check out the FAQ right here on tek-tips:

faq183-398 How do I know what type of index to create?

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