Firstly, I should point out I don’t have much knowledge on SQL Server indexes.
My situation is that I have an SQL Server 2008 database table that has a varchar(max) column usually filled with a lot of text.
My ASP.NET web application has a search facility which queries this column for keyword searches, and depending on the number of keywords searched for their may be one or many LIKE ‘%keyword%’ statements in the SQL query to do the search.
My web application also allows searching by various other columns in this table as well, not just that one column. There is also a few joins from other tables too.
My question is, is it worthwhile creating an index on this column to improve performance of these search queries? And if so, what type of index, and will just indexing the one column be enough or do I need to include other columns such as the primary key and other searchable columns?
It’s not worthwhile creating a regular index if you’re doing LIKE ‘%keyword%’ searches. The reason is that indexing works like searching a dictionary, where you start in the middle then split the difference until you find the word. That wildcard query is like asking you to lookup a word that contains the text “to” or something– the only way to find matches is to scan the whole dictionary.
You might consider a full-text search, however, which is meant for this kind of scenario (see here).