What is the difference between a clustered and a nonclustered index?

           

 A clustered index affects the way the rows of data in a table are stored on disk. When a clustered index is used, rows are stored in sequential order according to the index column value; for this reason, a table can contain only one clustered index, which is usually used on the primary index value.

           

A nonclustered index does not affect the way data is physically stored; it creates a new object for the index and stores the column(s) designated for indexing with a pointer back to the row containing the indexed values.

You can think of a clustered index as a dictionary in alphabetical order, and a nonclustered index as a book’s index.