Software Vendor Mistakes With SQL Server: Thinking Index Rebuilds Solve Every Problem

Posted on by Erik Darling

Salt Flats

It’s hard to believe that this is still a lively debate, given how far technology has come since the original conversations around if and when fragmentation is a problem were a thing, but here we are in 2020 for the third year straight.

I will give people some credit where it’s due, I’ve seen index maintenance habits change a bit over the years:

  • Reducing frequency to once a week or once a month from every night
  • Bumping the thresholds that they reorg and rebuild way higher than 5% and 30%, like 50% and 80%
  • Abandoning it all together when using AGs or other data synchronization technologies
  • Realizing how powerful and flexible statistics updates are, especially when using Ola’s scripts

It’s a good start, but people still ascribe far too many benefits to doing it. Rather than rehash everything I’ve ever said about it, I’m gonna post a video of Erin Stellato (b|t) and I discussing the pros, cons, whens, wheres, whys, and hows in this video:

Thanks for reading (and watching)!

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