Index Recommendations from the Database Engine Tuning Adviser should not be accepted blindly

The Problem

I ran a SQL Profiler session on one of our SQL databases toda to catch any expensive queries and see if they could be optimized. One query that showed up was one that selected the top 30 rows from one table where a certain bit column was set to true, sorted by oldest first. The table being queried had close to 100,000 rows in it. Each query took about 6,000 reads.

The query looked something like this:

 SELECT TOP (30) *  
 FROM TheTable  
 WHERE BitColumn = 1  
 ORDER BY DateColumn  

The Suggested Solution

My inclination was that all I needed to do was add a very small index on the column of type BIT being used in the WHERE clause. However, I went ahead and ran the query through the Database Engine Tuning Adviser, just to see what it came up with.

The index recommendation suggested an index on three columns, one of which was, in fact, the one in the WHERE clause. The Date column was also included along with the table’s Primary ID. The estimated improvement was 99%, which was great and what I had expected.

However, the suggested index also had every other table column in its INCLUDE statement. The result was that the new index was projected to take up 68.5 MB of space. That’s quite a bit of space for an index on a bit column.

The Employed Solution

Consequently, I manually went in to SQL Server Management Studio and just added a simple index on the column used in the WHERE clause. Then I checked the size of the new index and found that it was only 1.75 MB–quite significantly less than 68.5 MB.

The query now requires only 14 reads, compared with the nearly 6,000 it used before, and I haven’t added 68 MB of index storage to the database.

Final Remark

So, there are certainly times where the recommendations from the Database Tuning Adviser would probably be fine. Each case is different, of course. In this case, adding 68 MB of index storage just was not worth it. Adding a simple index manually gave the optimization we needed without really impacting the size of the database. Of course, 68 MB is not really a lot, but adding that 10 or 20 or 50 times when it is not necessary would certainly begin to unnecessarily impact it.

So, the Database Tuning Adviser is definitely helpful, but should probably be used more as a guide rather than as something not to be questioned.