Index Tuning Wizard

The Index Tuning Wizard is a new and powerful tool that analyzes your workload and recommends an optimal index configuration for your database.

Features of the Index Tuning Wizard include:

• Comparing, contrasting, and selecting the best mix of indexes using the query optimizer’s cost calculations.
• Recommending the best mix of indexes for a workload (trace file or SQL Script) against a database.
• Providing index, workload, table-use, and query-cost analysis.
• Tuning for an entire workload, which may include dropping existing indexes to reduce maintenance costs.
• Tuning the database for a set of problem queries without dropping existing indexes.
• Prototyping index configuration recommendations for different disk space constraints.

The Index Tuning Wizard creates SQL statements that can be used to drop ineffective indexes or to create new, more effective indexes and statistics on nonindexed columns. The SQL statements can be saved for manual execution as necessary.

For more information, see “Index Tuning Wizard” earlier in this volume.