PASS Data Community Summit Webinar Series: Learn From the Community, Then Meet Them in Seattle

PASS Summit West takes place November 9-11, 2026 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle, and it’s the flagship event of the year for the data community.

To get you ready, we’re hosting a free webinar series running from July through October featuring speakers who are also taking the stage in Seattle. Every two weeks, you’ll hear directly from practitioners, experts, and Redgate ambassadors on topics aligned with the themes shaping the data world right now including AI, analytics, cloud, and database management.

Ever had a developer, report writer, or data scientist ask you “why is my query slow?” or “should we add an index for this?” and struggled to explain it beyond “it’s the optimizer”? In this PASS Seattle Webinar Series 2026 session, Brent Ozar shows you a hands-on way to answer that question for good: how to actually see what SQL Server sees inside an index. Read this blog to learn more.

Visualizing Indexes in SQL Server: How to See What Your Index Really Looks Like

Using the Stack Overflow database’s Users table, Brent walks through how to write T-SQL queries that reveal an index’s raw contents in the exact order SQL Server stores them, and how to read the execution plan to prove it. You’ll pick up the difference between an Index Scan and an Index Seek, why a Sort operator means you’re no longer looking at the true index order, and a neat modulus-operator trick for sampling rows from huge tables without disturbing that order at all.

Brent covers the golden rule that makes or breaks a visualization query: no Sorts, no Joins, no Key Lookups. The moment either shows up in your execution plan, you’re no longer looking at the index as it truly exists on disk, you’re looking at something SQL Server rearranged in memory. From there, build up from a simple single-column index, to a multi-column index, to one with included columns, showing exactly how your SELECT list and ORDER BY need to line up with the index definition at each step.

Whether you’re a DBA, developer, or data professional who just wants a faster way to explain “why isn’t my query using the index we already have?”, this technique turns your SSMS results grid into a window straight into SQL Server’s storage engine.

Watch the Full Recording

We only scratched the surface here. Watch the full recording on YouTube to see every query, execution plan, and live demo in full, including how to simulate an Index Seek and sample billions of rows without ever triggering a Sort.

What’s Next in the PASS Seattle Webinar Series

This session is just one stop on the PASS Seattle Webinar Series 2026, our lineup of free sessions building up to PASS Summit West 2026. Each one is built to give you something you can use immediately, plus a taste of the content and community waiting for you in Seattle this November. See the full webinar lineup and what’s coming next.

Join Us at PASS Summit West 2026

Recordings and webinars are a great start, but nothing beats the real thing. PASS Summit West runs November 9–11, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Seattle, with 6 Pre-Conference Deep Dives, Keynotes, and over 65 sessions covering everything from SQL Server internals to AI and cloud architecture.

Register now to join us at PASS Summit West, November 9–11, 2026, in Seattle.