An interesting new feature in SQL2008

Rick Heiges recently mentioned on SQLblog.com a feature that I wasn’t aware of until his mention.  Filtered Indexes are kind of cool!  In a filtered index, you simply add a WHERE clause to your index code and it will only index certain values.

This could be very cool for huge inventory or order tables where you really only ever want the open or current items.  Instead of indexing the entire table and storing all those “closed” or “discontinued” values, you can store a blank value for these and avoid the space taken up for them as well as the sorting necessary to maintain the index with any more than 2 values.  It seems to be something useful for performance and storage, and it apparently has been out for over a decade in products like Fox Pro according to the article.

 If you haven’t checked out SQLblog.com until now, I think you should!