Pokémon Battle, Choose Your Index: You Can’t Have Them All

Index tuning often sounds abstract: selectivity, key order, includes, trade-offs. In this session, let's turn it into a game!

Delivered entirely through live demos and audience interaction, Brent Ozar turns index design into a series of Pokémon-style battles. Using the Users table from the Stack Overflow database, Brent Ozar presents real-world query patterns and invites the audience to “play” index cards—each representing a different index design—to see which ones win, which ones struggle, and which ones backfire.

As each query battle unfolds, you’ll see why some indexes are super-effective against certain workloads but weak against others, why covering everything is tempting (and dangerous), and why you can’t catch—or create—every index without paying a price. Brent will explain the results in plain English, tying each outcome back to how SQL Server actually uses indexes under the covers.

By the end of the session, you’ll walk away with a much stronger intuition for choosing the *right* index for a workload, understanding trade-offs, and explaining index decisions to developers and managers alike. No slides full of theory—just hands-on demos, real queries, and a room full of data professionals playing along.

Understand how different index designs succeed or fail against specific query patterns Learn why an index can be “super-effective” for one query and nearly useless for another Develop intuition for index trade-offs instead of memorizing rules