Maintaining Indexes and Statistics

Maintaining indexes and statistics is essential in most database environments, including those that have frequent changes to the data. These changes can cause tables and their indexes to become fragmented and inefficient. These types of environments can also lead to outdated statistics on indexes. Outdated statistics can cause the query engine to make less-than-optimal choices when determining the best access path to the data.

The maintenance of indexes and statistics is facilitated through the use of three different tasks in the Maintenance Plan Wizard: Reorganize Index, Rebuild Index, and Update Statistics. Using the Reorganize Index task is equivalent to running the ALTER INDEX REORGANIZE command. This task ...

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