Questions about Primary and Foreign Keys You Were Too Shy to Ask

It is strange that one can ask simple questions about extended events or Hekaton at professional events and conferences without feeling embarrassed, yet nobody likes to ask vital questions about SQL Server primary keys and foreign keys. Fear not, here are 13 questions you were too shy to ask, answered.

Why Primary Keys can be important on large tables

I inherited a database that was getting large and not performing well. After adding primary keys life got better.

Primary Key Primer for SQL Server

Every database developer uses keys, but without always understanding all the ramifications. They come with few hard and fast rules, but if you get them right from the start with a database design, the whole process of database development is simpler, and the result is likely to perform better. We asked Phil for advice, little knowing that the explanation might take a while.

Primary Keys which are not Clustered Indexes in a database

Recently I was asked to find all the Primary keys that are not clustered Indexes in the database. I constructed the below script which will help us to locate the primary keys in the database which are not clustered index.

BIT Primary Key

Find Primary Column of all tables in database

This code helps in finding Primary Keys for all tables in a database.

Find gaps in primary keys across multiple databases

Output table of gaps in a primary key across multiple databases on same, remote and/or linked servers.

Do You Really Need Surrogate Keys? Part 1 – Concepts and Methods

This is the first of a series of articles to analyze the use of surrogate keys in different scenarios.

Predict the outcome

Getting unique or primary key columns for a given table

Following script will list out all the columns which have unique/primary key constraints for a given table.