Heaps killed Vlad Drumea’s dog and now it’s time to get revenge:
In this post I cover some unpleasant side-effects of using heaps in SQL Server for anything else than staging tables.
In the past couple of months I’ve been running into performance issues caused by the strange decision to have very active tables as heaps.
And, at this point, I’m on a personal vendetta against heaps in SQL Server.
As a result, I’m writing this blog post so that I can refer people to it the next time I’ll have to explain why heaps don’t match their use cases.
I, for one, wholeheartedly support Vlad’s vendetta. There are very rare circumstances in which it makes sense to use a heap in a non-temporary SQL Server table. Otherwise, define that clustered index.