Last night I had the opportunity to once again speak at our local Baton Rouge SQL User Group meeting.  And as usual, it was a blast. 

The topic of choice was “Indexes and Execution Plans: Using them together for the better!” This was somewhat of a 101 class designed to show how you can read and use Execution Plans to build your indexing strategies.

An introduction into basic terms with minimal slides and then I was on to demos. My demos were all based on a Phone Book database that I created with a White Pages table and a Yellow Pages table.  I populated the data using this nifty website Mokcaroo.  One bit of new knowledge I learned during the process.  The tSQL phrase of INSERT INTO ….VALUES… has a 1000 row limit.  Who knew?

I believe meaningful discussion was had by all and without hesitation the “peanut gallery” were in top form!  Enjoyable to say the least!

My last point of the discussion was “how to determine if the indexes were useful”. I demonstrated the code I use to list all indexes and their usefulness.  My code to do this can be found in my previous blog post in the 8 Weeks of Indexes series: “Determining what you have now.”

During my presentation, I mentioned one of my favorite books on Execution Plans by Grant Fritchey (b|t) called SQL Server Execution Plans, Second Edition and ITS FREE so there is no excuse not to get it and read it!

Since my slide deck was very minimal because the focus was on the indexing demos, I really don’t see the point of posting it; but I will include the demo scripts just in case.