Creating indexes

[Chris St. John]

This is a basic question, but something I know very little about and would be very helpful to discuss for those of us who are just getting into SQL. Matt brought up the idea of creating appropriate indexes so things run more smoothly. What does that mean, how do you do it and what specific indexes have you set up in these databases?

[KiNG KoNG]

An index creates an ordered subset of a table in memory so that it can search it more quickly when doing lookups and joins.  Adding the appropriate index can significantly improve the speed of your queries.  Here is an article that covers index topics for both beginning and advanced users:

https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/performance/tune-your-indexing-strategy-with-sql-server-dmvs/