Increasing performance by creating a clustered index

Any RDBMS supports the functionality to perform the INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations, and retrieve the data with the SELECT statement. As time passes by, data will increase in the database, and it will start creating an issue of slow retrieval of data whenever the SELECT statement is processed.

RDBMS is supposed to support a very large-scale database, especially when you are talking about SQL Server 2012. So, how can we eliminate this slow performance issue? Well, this is when index makes an entry into the life of a database administrator!

Prevention is always better than cure, so it is suggested that you implement proper indexes and keep changing the indexes over a period of time, if needed, even before performance issues start arising.

How to choose a proper field for the index defined in this recipe, and how to maintain the index properly and change it, will be covered in the next chapter— Chapter 10, Maintaining Indexes.

A clustered...