Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

The older DBCC commands are still supported for backward compatibility, but Microsoft may remove
them at any time, so you should be proactive about updating those scripts should you come across any.
ALTER INDEX is the workhorse of database maintenance. We addressed this somewhat back in Chapter 9,
but let’s revisit this one, and then look at how to get it scheduled.
ALTER INDEX
The command ALTER INDEX is somewhat deceptive in what it does. While most ALTER commands have
been about changing the definition of our object — we ALTER tables to add or disable constraints and
columns, for example — ALTER INDEX is different; it is all about maintenance and zero about structure.
If you need to change the makeup of your index, you still need to either DROP and CREATE it, or you
need to CREATE and use the with the DROP_EXISTING=ON option.
An abbreviated version of the ALTER INDEX syntax looks like this:
ALTER INDEX { | ALL }
ON
{ REBUILD
[ [ WITH ( [ ,...n ] ) ]
| [ PARTITION =
[ WITH (
[ ,...n ] ) ] ] ]
| DISABLE
| REORGANIZE
[ PARTITION = ]
[ WITH ( LOB_COMPACTION = { ON | OFF } ) ]
| SET ( [ ,...n ] )
}
[ ; ]
A fair amount on this is fairly detailed “Realm of the advanced DBA” stuff — usually used on an ad hoc
basis to deal with very specific problems, but there are some core elements here that should be part of
our regular maintenance planning. We’ll start by looking at a couple of top parameters and then look at
the options that are part of our larger maintenance planning needs.
Index Name
You can name a specific index if you want to maintain one specific index, or use ALL to indicate that you
want to perform this maintenance on every index associated with the named table.
Table or View Name
Pretty much just what it sounds like: the name of the specific object (table or view) that you want to perform
the maintenance on. Note that it needs to be one specific table. (You can feed it a list and say “do all
of these please!”)
REBUILD
Chapter 19: Playing Administrator
This is the “industrial strength” approach to fixing an index. If you run ALTER INDEX with this option,
the old index is completely thrown away and reconstructed from scratch. The result is a truly optimized
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