Online Indexing Operations

One of the great features available with SQL Server 2012 is online indexing. This feature, available only with the Enterprise or Developer Edition, allows you to create, rebuild, or drop indexes without having exclusive access to the index or table. This means that users can have concurrent access to the underlying tables and indexes while the index operation is in progress. This bodes well for high-availability applications and databases that have limited downtime available for offline operations.

Note

SQL Server 2012 offers extended support for online index operations. In past versions, indexes that include large object (LOB) or XML data could not be rebuilt online. This restriction has been removed in SQL Server ...

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