Indexing Strategy and Selection Questions

Covers index design principles and practical selection of indexes to accelerate queries while managing storage and write cost. Topics include index types such as B tree hash and bitmap indexes and full text and functional indexes; single column composite and covering indexes; clustered versus nonclustered index architectures and partial or filtered indexes. Candidates should reason about index selectivity and cardinality and how statistics and histograms influence optimizer choices. Also assess index maintenance overhead fragmentation and rebuild strategies and the trade off between faster reads and slower inserts updates and deletes. Practical skills include reading execution plans to identify missing or inefficient indexes proposing index consolidation or covering index designs testing and benchmarking index changes and understanding interactions between indexing partitioning and denormalization.