Index Seek

We get many warnings in our SQL error log about I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete. What do we do in such scenario?

There are a few things which you will want to look at.  First make sure that you have enough RAM for the database to use.  Without enough RAM in the SQL Server you’ll begin putting extra load on the disks because the same data is being pulled into the buffer cache from the disk over and...

Dates can easily be the hardest datatype to work with.

The datetime data type can be one of the hardest to work with when it comes to index optimization.  Most queries that use a datetime data type for filtering (part of the where clause) only want to match the date portion of the value.  Most people handle this via a convert function around the date...

Back To Basics: What’s the difference between a Scan and a Seek?

There are a few basic operations which SQL will perform when looking for the data that you need.  Here they are listed in the order of worst to best.

• Table Scan
• Clustered Index Scan
• Index Scan
• Clustered Index Seek
• Index Seek