Index maintenance : these are not your father's maintenance plans!

UPDATE 2009-06-24

I have blogged about both of them before (here and here), but I can never say enough about how helpful their index maintenance scripts can be.  Both Ola Hallengren and Michelle Ufford (@sqlfool) have been extremely dedicated to building very useful maintenance scripts for you, me, and all the DBAs around you – even (or maybe especially) the involuntary ones.  I have used both, and because they offer so much more flexibility over the canned stuff you get in the built-in maintenance plans, I highly recommend trying them out.

Ola's scripts were updated earlier this month, and I am only getting to blogging about it now (sorry Ola!).  Some of the enhancements in this update:

  • rebuild and reorganize indexes at the partition level
  • exclude indexes in read-only filegroups
  • option to print commands instead of executing them
  • support for all builds of SQL Server 2005 and 2008 (previously, only 2005 SP2+ was supported)
  • backup solution now supports LiteSpeed in addition to native backups

You can read about and download Ola's solution here.

Michelle Ufford has released a new version of her solution as well.  The enhancements include:

  • bug fix surrounding LOB logic
  • added @scanMode and @rebuildStats options
  • added support for defragging model and msdb
  • helpful additions to the log table (for monitoring)
  • exclusion list (for scheduling)

You can download Michelle's solution here.

I just want to echo a huge THANK YOU to both of these individuals for donating their time, energy and knowledge into developing and maintaining these scripts for the community at large.

Aaron Bertrand

I am a passionate technologist with industry experience dating back to Classic ASP and SQL Server 6.5. I am a long-time Microsoft MVP, write at Simple Talk, SQLPerformance, and MSSQLTips, and have had the honor of speaking at more conferences than I can remember. In non-tech life, I am a father of two, a huge hockey and football fan, and my pronouns are he/him. If I've helped you out, consider thanking me with a coffee. :-)

1 Response

  1. jerryhung says:

    I use Ola's re-index solutions in many places, +1!
    (reason is it didn't require a db like Michelle's)