>Why not create an extra "statistics" table which is updated automatically
>through triggers in your original table? That way, you will always get
>up-to-date INSTANT query results no matter how huge your original table is.
>
>And, don't forget that the only way MS SQL can achieve the better performance
>here is through mercilessly hogging ressources. In a complex database
>environment with even larger tables, the performance gain in MS SQL would be
>minimal (my guess).
Definitely. This is a design optimization problem not an index problem.