Thursday, September 02, 2010

SqlServer Standard Edition DOES Support Indexed Views

Why on earth do nine out of ten articles on SqlServer Indexed Views state, that they are only available in Enterprise and Developer Edition? This is blatantly wrong, and prevents developers from using a great performance tuning feature.

Standard Edition DOES support Indexed Views (and from what I have heard, but not tried: even so does Express Edition). The only difference is, that one has to provide a "with (noexpand)" query hint in order for the Indexed View to be applied in Standard Edition (I checked execution plans to go sure). Plus Enterprise Edition can choose to use an Indexed View for optimization, even if it does not appear in the original query.

I think this whole confusion might be caused by Microsoft's SqlServer feature matrices, which are pretty unclear on that topic, too.