>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.