Greg Linwood gave an excellent presentation of his SQL Server “Indexing for Developers” talk at the Perth .NET User Group last night. He covered the use of clustered and non-clustered indexes and how they actually work ‘under the hood’.
I believe that it is important for developers and architects to understand these topics, as databases are often created without regard to how they will be used in production, with the effect that production systems do not perform as well as they could do.
Greg is presenting another talk this evening (details here) aimed at database administrators (but also relevant to developers) on managing indexes. If you work with SQL Server, I strongly recommend you attend these talks when Greg presents them at a local User Group near you.