What is the basic difference between clustered and a non-clustered index?

nikhil kansal

20y11.9k

2 Answers

down vote accepted Clustered Index Only one per table Faster to read than non clustered as data is physically stored in index order Non Clustered Index Can be used many times per table Quicker for insert and update operations than a clustered index

Manoj Kumar Duraisamy9y

The difference is that, Clustered index is unique for any given table and we can have only one clustered index on a table. The leaf level of a clustered index is the actual data and the data is resorted in case of clustered index. Whereas in case of non-clustered index the leaf level is actually a pointer to the data in rows so we can have as many non-clustered indexes as we can on the db.

nikhil kansal20y