I'm currently doing some testing to determine the performance implications of including an index on a given column in SQL Server 2005.

The test data set I'm using has approximately ~72 million rows (about 6 GB of data). In order to actually *test* the performance of the index I need to be able to compare the performance with and without the index there.

That's all well and fine, but creating an index in the first place is not a cheap operation. If I want to test the table without the index, I need to, at the very least, disable the index. To test with the index I need to re-enable it which takes quite a long time.

Is there any way that I can force SQL Server 2005 to ignore a given index when it's executing a query? I don't want to have to disable the index just to test a query since it takes such a long time to disable the index.