Question: By default, a SQLServer table clustered index is the PK. If I define that:

* such key is a GUID and
* I will generate at random a.k.a `Guid.NewGuid()` and
* forget to set the clustered index to a more meaningful column

will SQLServer reorder the pages as a new record enters the table or will it just "ignore" the clustered part of the index?

Answer: 
You can normalize each column without converting to a data frame with the `apply` function:

```
apply(mym, 2, normalize)
#   (Intercept)   a   b   c
# 1         NaN 0.0 0.0 0.0
# 2         NaN 0.5 0.5 0.5
# 3         NaN 1.0 1.0 1.0

```

You probably actually want to leave the intercept untouched, with something like:

```
cbind(mym[,1,drop=FALSE], apply(mym[,-1], 2, normalize))
#   (Intercept)   a   b   c
# 1           1 0.0 0.0 0.0
# 2           1 0.5 0.5 0.5
# 3           1 1.0 1.0 1.0

```
If you want to "normalize" in one sense you can just use the `scale` function which centers and sets the std.dev to 1.

```
> scale( mym )
  (Intercept)  a  b  c
1         NaN -1 -1 -1
2         NaN  0  0  0
3         NaN  1  1  1
attr(,"assign")
[1] 0 1 2 3
attr(,"scaled:center")
(Intercept)           a           b           c 
          1           2           2           2 
attr(,"scaled:scale")
(Intercept)           a           b           c 
          0           1           1           1 
> mym
  (Intercept) a b c
1           1 1 1 1
2           1 2 2 2
3           1 3 3 3
attr(,"assign")
[1] 0 1 2 3

```

As you can see, it doesn't really make sense to "normalize" all of the model matrix when the "Intercept" term is present. So you could instead do this:

```
> mym[ , -1 ] <- scale( mym[,-1] )
> mym
  (Intercept)  a  b  c
1           1 -1 -1 -1
2           1  0  0  0
3           1  1  1  1
attr(,"assign")
[1] 0 1 2 3

```

This is actually the model matrix that would result if your default contrasts option was set to "contr.sum" and the columns were factor type. This only gets accepted as an internal-to-`model.matrix` operation if the variables to be "normalized" are factors:

```
> mym <- model.matrix(as.formula("~ a + b + c"), mydf, contrasts.arg=list(a="contr.sum"))
Error in `contrasts<-`(`*tmp*`, value = contrasts.arg[[nn]]) : 
  contrasts apply only to factors
> mydf <- data.frame(a = factor(c(1,2,3)), b = c(1,2,3), c = c(1,2,3))
> mym <- model.matrix(as.formula("~ a + b + c"), mydf, contrasts.arg=list(a="contr.sum"))
> mym
  (Intercept) a1 a2 b c
1           1  1  0 1 1
2           1  0  1 2 2
3           1 -1 -1 3 3
attr(,"assign")
[1] 0 1 1 2 3
attr(,"contrasts")
attr(,"contrasts")$a
[1] "contr.sum"

```