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A newspaper obituary portrait in soft black and white of a server rack from the late 1990s, slightly out of focus, with a small black border.

The Nightly Index Rebuild Job, 1998 to 2026: An Obituary

October 27, 2026
Pinal Dave
SQL Performance
Maintenance Plan, SQL Index, SQL Performance, SQL Statistics, Transaction Log

The nightly index rebuild job has died after a long illness. It was born in 1998 to a hard disk that could not seek. It never believed the disk had been replaced. It is survived by page density, which did most of its work all along.

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Gravel path illuminated at night.

Your Index Rebuild Maintenance Plan Is Rebuilding Indexes Nobody Uses

September 17, 2026
Pinal Dave
SQL Performance
Maintenance Plan, SQL Index, SQL Statistics

Your index rebuild maintenance plan takes four hours every Sunday, fills the log and delays the backup. It may be buying you far less than everybody assumes.

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SQL Server Maintenance Techniques

SQL Server Maintenance Techniques: A Comprehensive Guide to Keeping Your Server Running Smoothly

October 6, 2023
Pinal Dave
SQL Tips and Tricks
Hardware, Maintenance Plan, SQL Audit, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Error Messages, SQL Index, SQL Log, SQL Server Security, SQL Statistics, SQL Upgrade, Testing

This comprehensive guide explore into some essential maintenance techniques and best practices to ensure your SQL Server deployment.

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A pea sheller with some pods processed and many pods still waiting

Query Progress: Watching a Running Plan With dm_exec_query_profiles

July 28, 2021
Pinal Dave
SQL Tips and Tricks
Execution Plan, Maintenance Plan, SQL Server

Elapsed time cannot tell you if a query is almost done. Live operator rows can. See how to read them and how far to trust the percentage.

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Different plowshare shapes arranged beside the distinct furrows they make

Ten Plan Operators Explained: An Operator Cheat Sheet

March 4, 2021
Pinal Dave
SQL Tips and Tricks
Execution Plan, Maintenance Plan, SQL Operator

Seek, scan, lookup, three joins, sort, aggregate, spool and parallelism, each shown with a tiny demo. Learn to judge a plan by rows and executions.

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A new adjustable clamp aligns boards while an old clamp rests unused

What is the Replacement of DBCC DBREINDEX? – Interview Question of the Week #263

February 9, 2020
Pinal Dave
Personal
Maintenance Plan, SQL Index, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Server DBCC

Question: What is the Replacement of DBCC DBREINDEX?

Answer: The answer to this question is very simple.

Here is the syntax:

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Gouache painting of a garden hose with a kink held by a vermilion clip and a sputtering sprinkler beyond

Query Runs Slow Occasionally: Five Checks to Find Why

September 7, 2019
Pinal Dave
SQL Performance
Maintenance Plan, SQL Lock, SQL Scripts, SQL TempDB, SQL Wait Stats

When a query runs slow occasionally, the cause sits around the query: a lock, a job, a file growth, tempdb or a shortage of worker threads. This post gives one tested T-SQL check for each and a small demo for blocking and file growth. It also says what to do when all five checks find nothing.

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