title: Index Decreases Number of Rows Read; No performance Gain
body: <p>I created a non-clustered, non-unique index on a column (date) on a large table (16 million rows), but am getting very similar query speeds when compared to the exact same query that's being forced to not use any indexes.</p>
  
  <p>Query 1 (uses index):</p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT *
  FROM testtable 
  WHERE date BETWEEN '01/01/2017' AND '03/01/2017'
  ORDER BY date
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Query 2 (no index):</p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT *
  FROM testtable WITH(INDEX(0)) 
  WHERE date BETWEEN '01/01/2017' AND '03/01/2017'
  ORDER BY date
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Both queries take the same amount of time to run, and return the same result.  When looking at the Execution plan for each, Query 1's number of rows read is<br>
  ~ 4 million rows, where as Query 2 is reading 106 million rows.  It appears that the index is working, but I'm not gaining any performance benefits from it.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas as to why this is, or how to increase my query speed in this case would be much appreciated.     </p>