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