Alex Stuart lays out a finding:
While testing a script that involved calculating index record size recently I was getting some confusing results depending on server version, and after some digging it appears there was a somewhat undocumented change to nonclustered index leaf page structure in SQL Server 2012.
Prior to 2012, as dicussed by Paul Randal in this 2010 blog post (which is still the top result for searching for ‘nonclustered index null bitmap’, hence this post) the null bitmap – that is, a >= 3 byte structure representing null fields in a record – was essentially present in all data pages but not the leaf pages of a nonclustered index that had no nulls in either the index key or any clustering key columns.
Read on for a demonstration using SQL Server 2008 R2 as well as SQL Server 2012.
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