Why do we blog? Why should I blog? Very little of what I say has any value to anyone but myself. My friends laugh at my quips and chastize me for being cynical and judgemental. I live, I question, and I form strong opinions. This blog won't be for the faint of heart, nor the needy of mindless dribble and clever euphamisms. I tell it how I see it, which is likely not the way it is. I am my own filter, my own critic, and my own inspiration. This is the trickling madness of a cynical solipsist.
I had morning coffee with a well respected friend of mine recently. Aside from chatting about the usual wifery and family, we touched on the subject of clustered indices and SQL Server performance. A common misconception in the software industry is that a clustered index will make your database queries faster. In fact, most cases will demonstrate the polar opposite of this assumption. The reason for this misconception is a misunderstanding of how the clustered index works in any database server. A clustered index is a node clustering of records that share a common index value. When you decide on an index strategy for your data, you must consider the range of data to be indexed. Remember back to your data structures classes and what you were taught about hashtable optimizations. A hashtable, which is another way of saying a database index, is just a table of N values that organizes a set of M records in quickly accessible lists that are of order L, where L is significantly less than M. ...