An alternative for Index with Include: CLUSTERED (UNIQUE) Index

Indexes are good and helpful for reading from the tables and one can add different indexes based on any kind of queries that are going to be issued against the tables and make sure they always hit indexes, not the table. But that strategy has a drawback: it’ll slow down inserts into the table because everytime a new record is added to the table, all the indexes on the table need to be updated. That was the reason I was looking at the list of indexes I have on one of my busiest summary tables to see if I can get rid of any on them and make my inserts faster (This table is updated once a day and takes about 8 minutes for 1.5 million records)
I realized I have 3 separate indexes on different subsets of the columns that are in my UNIQUE index, each one with different INCLUDE columns. And in case you don’t know what INCLUDE columns do, they are saved alongside the primary columns in index so that they can be read by accessing the index rather than having to go to the table and get them from there. This could mean doubling (or tripling) the space the table takes on disk.
Now, let’s see what a UNIQUE CLUSTERED index does. A clustered index forces the order at which the records are stored in disk. for example, if our table has 2 columns, ID and Name, and there is a clustered index on ID column:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Table_1](
[ID] [int] NOT NULL,
[Name] [varchar](50) NOT NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]

CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX [Ind1] ON [dbo].[Table_1]
(
[ID] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, SORT_IN_TEMPDB = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, DROP_EXISTING = OFF, ONLINE = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON)
GO

Now, let’s add 3 records to the table:
INSERT INTO [dbo].[Table_1]
([ID]
,[Name])
VALUES
(2
,’S’)
GO

INSERT INTO [dbo].[Table_1]
([ID]
,[Name])
VALUES
(3
,’M’)
GO

INSERT INTO [dbo].[Table_1]
([ID]
,[Name])
VALUES
(1
,’Z’)
GO

If you query the table now, you’ll see that the result will be sorted by values in Id column, without having any ORDER BY clause in the query. This means that the data inserted into the table is already saved into the disk sorted by the column in clustered index, not by the order at which the data is inserted into the table. In other words, if we query the table and filter by ID, query engine will be able to locate the record satisfying the condition in where clause without having to search through the whole table. And guess what, this has exactly the same effect as we had an index (non clustered) on ID and included Name in it.

This can work in any case when there is the need for creating index with include columns in it. And it best works when the columns making the clustered index form a unique key on the table, simply because having a UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX not only tells the query engine how to locate the records, but it also makes it sure that every occurrence of the index is unique and happens one and only once.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.