Question

I have seen several execution plan examples and they displayed “Nonclustered Index Insert Showplan Operator”. I went ahead and created a table with non-clustered index.

If I insert there and display actual (or estimated) exec. plan I cant see this operator. Only clustered index insert or table insert (depending on the structure).

Using version SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition.

Am I missing something? Thanks!

Answer 1

You probably need to insert a greater number of rows to see the non clustered index maintenance shown as a separate operator.

You can either get a “wide” (per-index) or a “narrow” (per-row) plan.

For narrow plans the index maintenance is not shown as a separate operator in the plan. In Management Studio you can right click the clustered index insert operator and in the properties window expand the “Object” node to see the affected indexes for this type of plan.

So for example

CREATE TABLE #T(
A INT CONSTRAINT PK PRIMARY KEY, 
B INT CONSTRAINT UQ UNIQUE) 


/*narrow plan*/
INSERT INTO #T 
SELECT 1,1

/*wide plan*/   
INSERT INTO #T 
SELECT DISTINCT number, number
FROM master..spt_values
WHERE number <> 1

DROP TABLE #T

Gives the following two plans

And expanding the properties window for the CI insert operator in the first plan shows