Key count in sys[.]indexes

(Tibor Karaszi) The old sysindexes table (as of 2005 implemented as a compatibility view) has a useful column named keycnt. This is supposed to give us the number of columns (keys) in the index. However, to make heads and tails out of the numbers, we need to understand how a non-clustered index is constructed. For a heap, the pointer to a row is the physical file/page/row address (aka "rowid"). This is counted as a key in the keycnt column:

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