To Rebuild or Reorganize: That is the Question

First off: ‘Reorganize’ and ‘Rebuild’ are two different operations that each reduce fragmentation in an index. They work differently toward the same end. You don’t need to run both against the same index. (I sometimes find that people are doing both against every index in a maintenance plan. That’s just double the work and NOT double the fun.)

Rebuild: An index ‘rebuild’ creates a fresh, sparkling new structure for the index. If the index is disabled, rebuilding brings it back to life. You can apply a new fillfactor when you rebuild an index. If you cancel a rebuild operation midway, it must roll back (and if it’s being done offline, that can take a while).

Reorganize: This option is more lightweight. It runs through the leaf level of the index, and as it goes it fixes physical ordering of pages and also compacts pages to apply any previously set fillfactor settings. This operation is always online, and if you cancel it then it’s able to just stop where it is (it doesn’t have a giant operation to rollback).

Factors to consider:

  • Standard Edition rebuilds ain’t awesome. If you’ve got SQL Server Standard Edition, index rebuilds are always an offline operation. Bad news: they’re also single-threaded. (Ouch!)
  • Enterprise Edition rebuilds have gotchas. With SQL Server Enterprise Edition, you can specify an online rebuild — unless the index contains large object types. (This restriction is relaxed somewhat in SQL Server 2012). You can also use parallelism when creating or rebuilding an index— and that can save a whole lot of time. Even with an online rebuild, a schema modification lock (SCH-M) is needed at the time the fresh new index is put in place. This is an exclusive lock and in highly concurrent environments, getting it can be a big (blocking) problem.
  • There’s a bug in SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition Rebuilds that can cause corruption. If you’re running SQL Server 2012 SP1 – SP2, parallel online index rebuilds can cause corruption. Read about your options here.
  • Rebuilding partitioned tables is especially tricky. You can rebuild an entire partitioned index online– but nobody really wants to do that because they’re huge! The whole idea behind horizontal partitioning is to break data into more manageable chunks, right? Unfortunately, partition level rebuilds are offline until SQL Server 2014.
  • Reorganizing can be pretty cool. ‘Reorganizing’ an index is always an online op, no matter what edition of SQL Server you’re using. It doesn’t require a schema mod lock, so it can provide better concurrency. Reorganizing only defragments the leaf level of the index. On large tables it can take longer than a rebuild would take, too. But as I said above, it’s nice that you can reorganize for a while and then stop without facing a massive rollback.

You Didn’t Answer the Question: Do I Use Rebuild or Reorganize?

Yeah, I totally dodged that question, didn’t I?

If you have a regularly scheduled downtime every weekend, you’re probably fine with straight up index rebuilds, even if you have Standard Edition. Single threaded offline index maintenance may not be the hottest thing in the world, but hey, if you’ve got time for it then embrace the simplicity.

If you have Enterprise Edition, embrace parallel index rebuilds– and use the ONLINE option for indexes that allow it if people need to access the database during your maintenance window.

If you have database mirroring or AlwaysOn Availability Groups, tread with caution– particularly with rebuilds. It’s easy to generate a ton of IO with index maintenance, and it could mean putting your secondaries or mirror so far behind that they can’t catch up.

Maintenance plans or custom scripts?

You can go the easy way and use SQL Server Maintenance Plans, but unfortunately they’re very simplistic: you can only say “rebuild all the indexes” or “reorganize all the indexes”. You cannot say, “If the index is 45% or more fragmented, rebuild it– otherwise do nothing.” If you don’t spend much time with SQL Server and you’ve got downtime available every weekend, this can be a decent option.

If you need to minimize downtime, custom index maintenance scripts are the way to go. Our favorite: Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts. These are super flexible, well documented, and … free! The scripts have all sorts of cool options like time boxing and statistics maintenance.

Some tips for using Ola Hallengren’s index maintenance scripts:

  1. Download and configure them on a test instance first. There’s a lot of options on parameters, and you’ll need to play with them.
  2. Get used the ‘cmdexec’ job step types. When you install the scripts you’ll see that the SQL Server Agent jobs run index maintenance using a call to sqlcmd.exe in an MSDOS style step. That’s by design!
  3. Use the examples on the website. If you scroll to the bottom of the index maintenance page you’ll find all sorts of examples showing how to get the procedure to do different useful things.

Sources:

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2013/09/index-maintenance-sql-server-rebuild-reorganize/

Last modified: August 19, 2021

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