SQL Server Index Fragmentation And Broken Demos

Egg Meet Face

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The other night I was presenting for a user group, and I had a demo break on me.

Not the first time, not the last time. But this was weird because I had rehearsed things that morning.

I skipped over it at the time, but afterwards I started thinking about what had happened, and walking back through other stuff I had done that day.

Turns out, I had fragmented my indexes, and that broke a trivial plan demo.

Just Too Trivial

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The working demo looks like this.

I run these queries. The top one receives a trivial plan, and doesn’t have a missing index request.

The bottom one gets full optimization, and one shows up.

	/*Nothing for you*/
	SELECT *
	FROM dbo.Users AS u
	WHERE u.Reputation = 2;

	/*Missing index requests*/
	SELECT *
	FROM dbo.Users AS u
	WHERE u.Reputation = 2
	AND 1 = (SELECT 1);

Snap Your Shot

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How I had broken this demo was by playing with Snapshot Isolation.

At some point earlier in the day, I had done something like this:

ALTER DATABASE StackOverflow2013 
    SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON;

BEGIN TRAN
UPDATE dbo.Users SET Reputation += 1
ROLLBACK

When you use optimistic isolation levels, a 14 byte pointer gets added to every row to keep track of its version.

If I had run the update without it, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But, you know.

I’m not that lucky. Or smart.

See, after updating every row in the table, my table got uh… bigger.

Now, if I rebuild the table with snapshot still on, the problem goes away.

The problem is that I didn’t do that before or after my little experiment.

With a heavily fragmented index, both queries not only get fully optimized, but also go parallel.

They’re both a bit faster. They both use a little more resources.

Why? Because SQL Server looked at the size of the table and decided it would be expensive to scan this big chonker.

Egg Wipes

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Moral of the story: Index fragmentation makes your queries better.

Don’t @ me.

Going Further

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If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that and need to solve performance problems quickly.