Most of you are probably aware that having a clustered index on the column(s) in an ORDER BY clause means that SQL Server can avoid having to sort your data, because it is already logically stored in order of the clustered index, and SQL Server can just access the data in order to get the sorted data . For example, consider the SalesOrderHeader ...

  Hopefully, if you know enough about SQL Server to understand most of my posts here, you're aware of the fact that using a nonclustered index is not always an optimal choice for accessing data, particularly if there are thousands (or more) rows of data you need to retrieve.  However, we should never say 'never'. ...