Index fragmentation

A law firm client, occasionally has issues with their legal software, that is provided by the global leader in this field. The response from the software provider is always the same - you have index fragmentation. This is not a great response from a very expensive software provider. Especially when they have tables with no indexes, heap tables, do not use included columns on any indexes.

They blame the maintenance.

With the database maintenance (Ola Hallengren's stored procedures and jobs) that is run nightly we took a conservative approach. This is to ensure that we minimize the time taken.

Criteria:

Reorganize indexes with fragmentation between >20% and =<30%

Rebuild with fragmentation > 30%.

We only include an index if it has > 10 pages – so forget really small tables.

We did change this to be more aggressive, but the fragmentation was not the issue. Incorrect indexing was the problem, but the vendor has their standard response.

I still think that this is an outstanding blog on index fragmentation.

https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/where-do-the-books-online-index-fragmentation-thresholds-come-from/