A lof of time your index will get fragmented over time if you do a lot of updates or inserts and deletes.

We will look at an example by creating a table, fragmenting the heck out of it and then doing a reorganize and rebuild on the index.

First create this table

CREATE TABLE TestIndex (name1 varchar(500) 
not null,id int 
not null,userstat  int not null,
name2 varchar(500) not null,
SomeVal uniqueidentifier not null)

Now insert 50000 rows

INSERT TestIndex
SELECT top 50000 s.name,s.id,s.userstat,s2.name,newid() 
FROM master..sysobjects s
CROSS JOIN master..sysobjects s2

Now create this index

CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX IX_TestIndex_Index ON TestIndex(SomeVal)

Now let us look at some data by using the sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats DMV. Keep this query handy, we will run it many times

SELECT Object_name(object_id) as Tablename,s.name as Indexname
,index_type_desc
,avg_fragmentation_in_percent
,page_count
FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(), NULL, NULL , NULL, N'LIMITED') d
join sysindexes s on d.object_id = s.id
and d.index_id = s.indid
and s.name ='IX_TestIndex_Index'

(Result Set)

That is good, almost no fragmentation. Let’s change that shall we?

UPDATE TestIndex
SET SomeVal = NEWID()

Okay, now you can see that the index is completely fragmented, we are also using 955 pages to store the data instead of 451

(Result Set)

There are two ways to fix fragmentation, one is to reorganize the index and the other is to rebuild the index. Reorganize is an online operation while rebuild is not unless you specify ONLINE = ON, ONLINE = ON will only work on Enterprise editions of SQL Server.

Here is how to do a reorganize

ALTER INDEX IX_TestIndex_Index ON TestIndex
REORGANIZE;

(Result Set)

As you can see after the reorganize(DBCC INDEXDEFRAG for you SQL Server 2000 folks) fragmentation levels dropped to less than 3 percent.

Just for fun let’s also rebuild (Drop and recreate the index for you SQL Server 2000 folks) the index

ALTER INDEX IX_TestIndex_Index ON TestIndex
REBUILD;

(Result Set)

As you can see the rebuild made fragmentation almost 0

Here are two differences between REBUILD ONLINE = ON and REBUILD ONLINE = OFF

ON

Long-term table locks are not held for the duration of the index operation. During the main phase of the index operation, only an Intent Share (IS) lock is held on the source table. This allows queries or updates to the underlying table and indexes to continue. At the start of the operation, a Shared (S) lock is very briefly held on the source object. At the end of the operation, an S lock is very briefly held on the source if a nonclustered index is being created, or an SCH-M (Schema Modification) lock is acquired when a clustered index is created or dropped online, or when a clustered or nonclustered index is being rebuilt. ONLINE cannot be set to ON when an index is being created on a local temporary table.

OFF

Table locks are applied for the duration of the index operation. An offline index operation that creates, rebuilds, or drops a clustered, spatial, or XML index, or rebuilds or drops a nonclustered index, acquires a Schema modification (Sch-M) lock on the table. This prevents all user access to the underlying table for the duration of the operation. An offline index operation that creates a nonclustered index acquires a Shared (S) lock on the table. This prevents updates to the underlying table but allows read operations, such as SELECT statements.

Of course you will not run rebuild/reorganize manually for every index in your database, Michelle Ufford from the SQL Fool blog has a nice post with just a script which can do this automatically, you can find that here: Index Defrag Script

Permissions

I added this section because our SQLCop tool has an index fragmentation check, unfortunately if you don’t have permissions you get an error. Big thanks to George for taking the time to write this section.

In order to run the query that checks for fragmented indexes, you need to have VIEW DATABASE STATE permissions.

To determine if you have this permission:

IF Exists(SELECT 1 FROM fn_my_permissions (NULL, 'DATABASE') WHERE permission_name = 'VIEW DATABASE STATE')
  SELECT 'You have permission'
ELSE
  SELECT 'You do not have permission'

If you do not have permissions, a security admin on your server can grant you permissions with the following query:

GRANT VIEW DATABASE STATE TO YourLoginName

You can also deny this permission to a user with the following query:

DENY VIEW DATABASE STATE TO YourLoginName

This post is also on our SQL Server Admin Hacks