SQL Server: Index Fragmentation Internals, Analysis, and Solutions
By Paul Randal
Course info
Course info
Description
You cannot escape index fragmentation in any SQL Server environment, no matter which version of SQL Server you're using or what hardware or I/O subsystem you have, and it can be detrimental to performance in many ways. In this comprehensive course, you will learn everything you need to know about index fragmentation, including why it's a problem, how it happens, how to detect it, how to avoid it, and how to remove it. The course is applicable to anyone responsible for SQL Server performance, including developers, DBAs, and architects. All course demos are shown on SQL Server 2014 with references to behaviors (where different) on all versions. Strategies for index fragmentation prevention, mitigation, and removal that you will learn in the course apply to SQL Server 2005 onward.
About the author
Paul is the CEO of SQLskills.com, a Microsoft Regional Director and a SQL Server MVP. He worked on the SQL Server Storage Engine team at Microsoft from 1999 to 2007. Among other things, he wrote DBCC CHECKDB/repair for SQL Server 2005 and was responsible for the Core Storage Engine during SQL Server 2008 development.
More from the author
Transcript
Hi everyone, my name is Paul Randal and welcome to my course, SQL Server: Index Fragmentation Internals, Analysis, and Solutions. I am a SQL Server consultant with SQLskills, as well as a Microsoft Data Platform MVP, and this topic is one that I've been presenting for many years because I find that many DBAs, developers, and architects don't take index fragmentation into account when designing a database or maintaining performance of the deployed design. I also wrote many of the tools for managing index fragmentation when I worked on the SQL Server team at Microsoft.
It's really impossible to escape index fragmentation once you have indexes, and even clustered indexes suffer from index fragmentation problems when the cluster key leads to random inserts.
In this course, we're going to cover everything there is to know about index fragmentation.
We will cover:
- how it happens
- the various methods for detecting it
- how to mitigate it through design or the use of index fill factors
- and the various ways you can remove or reduce it by rebuilding or reorganizing indexes
By the end of this course, you'll have a really good understanding about why it's important to be aware of index fragmentation and what you can do about it.
If you work with SQL Server in any capacity, whatever your level, this course is relevant to you and you only need a basic understanding of SQL Server to be able to comfortably follow along.
I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn how to get your index performance back with the SQL Server: Index Fragmentation Internals, Analysis, and Solutions course, here on Pluralsight
