>Vin..
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>A link table will frequently be used in joins and queries. The query optimizer strongly favors a clustered index. Of any kind of table, I could see where a link table might benefit more since a clustered index would ensure records that are grouped together would be physically ordered together.
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>I would encourage you to check out the responses from Travis, Val, and Rod as well.
I follow that, but I still think it depends on anticipated use. I am working on an app right now where a set of particular customer actions is tracked very closely, but rarely reported on. In other words, the tables/sets-of-tables are queried infrequently, but written to very frequently. In this case, we don't need the speed gain of the clustered index (reports are run monthly, at best -- an 10 minute run is not much worse than a 4 minute run in this case! And in fact, they may begin to archive this stuff anyway). But the loss in speed on INSERTs would just kill us.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russell