Learn SQL Server Administration in a Month of Lunches

Chapter 10. Maintaining indexes

In the previous chapter, I explained how SQL Server indexes are built, and broadly hinted at how SQL Server uses them. Indexes will play a big part in many upcoming chapters, as they’re one of the biggest performance-related items that an administrator can potentially play with. In keeping with this book’s overall theme, though, I’m assuming that your databases are already indexed using whatever indexes the database application developer figured would work well.

But indexes, like cars, don’t work very well, for very long, unless they’re properly maintained.

10.1. Understanding index fragmentation

The biggest problem—the only operational problem—that indexes run into is fragmentation. Remember that an index is ...