T-SQL Tip 11: They Call Me The Seeker

In T-SQL Tip 9, we discussed how execution plans could have a SCAN operator that went from the beginning to the end of a range of data. SCANs were iffy. Now that we’ve built a non-clustered index (T-SQL Tip 10) our execution plans will have the chance to do a lot more SEEKs. A seek is when the SQL Server optimizer goes straight to the page that has your data in it. If you have 10 rows to retrieve from a table and SQL chooses a seek, SQL is going straight to that exact data it needs 10 times. We make non-clustered indexes to get this outcome. This is nice.