In one case, I saw an all-solid-state server generate ~25GB of transaction logs in under 3 minutes – all of which had to be copied out to the various reporting and disaster recovery servers. Thanks! What is your perspective will it optimize the timing of the maintenance job if we keep it as ‘N’ . Although this has been a long article, it still does not cover every option in great depth. I think there may be another exception with statistics on heaps where checking row modifications is particularly frustrating, but I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly or not. They’re better than yours (trust me), and they give you more flexibility than built-in maintenance plans. I personally think the 1,000 page limit is conservative and on most systems would raise it a bit higher. You can also subscribe without commenting. When I’ve got tables that are heavily fragmented, and I’m convinced that a rebuild will solve the problem, AND I can only rebuild them offline, then I want to run the stored procedure manually when I can be around to keep an eye on it. Creating the CommandExecute stored procedure, Creating the DatabaseBackup stored procedure, Creating the DatabaseIntegrityCheck stored procedure, Creating the IndexOptimize stored procedure, DatabaseIntegrityCheck – SYSTEM_DATABASES, Copyright 1999 - 2020 Red Gate Software Ltd. Yes. Ola defaults to ‘N’. This script creates a job called “Index Maintenance Solution” that runs daily at 22:00. Tim – I don’t have general across-the-board recommendations on those. It is also supported on all editions of SQL Server. In your own blog, you did suggest we can use Maintenance Plans and not bother about Ola’s script. You may choose to run this job daily, weekly, or monthly. We’ve also separated the statistics update from the re-indexing process to ensure all the re-indexing completes quickly, do that first so any index rebuilds update index statistics with the full scan equivalent. Unfortunately it is not something that there is a parameter for in the SP. In addition, if you chose to have the script create them, the pre-configured maintenance jobs will be created as well. In addition, none of the jobs have been scheduled, because you, as the DBA, must decide what jobs you want to run, and when, in order to minimize the performance impact these jobs can have when they execute. I like to have more than one tool in my toolbox. For example, if index fragmentation is High, then it might be rebuilt. I haven’t seen any “baked in” retry logic in IndexOptimize but if it really is for one particular index, you could fairly easily build in a second step in your Agent job to check the latest result for that particular index in master.dbo.CommandLog, assuming you are running with the CommandLog on, and then fire a retry based on the status there. Closed. Then you’ll want to do root cause analysis on those tables to figure out why they are getting fragmented so quickly…better to fix the source of the trouble, if possible. If you plan to use this job, you still have one mandatory step you must take, and several optional steps. When i checked for fragmentation in one of my huge database the results were shocking. At that time, a combination of database maintenance jobs created using the SQL Server Maintenance Wizard, along with a collection of custom Transact-SQL scripts, were used throughout the organization. The indexOptimize by default maintains index fragmentation on partition level. Other than these five potential changes, the script does not have to be modified (although you have that option if you want to customize the script). For various reasons we’ve been seeing accumulation of fragmentation on system-generated CDC _CT tables in some environments, and since we didn’t want to lump all system tables in, we created a second step that targets the CDC enabled databases (and only cdc schema tables), just does reorganizes (I’ve had deadlock issues occasionally with online rebuilds due to schema mod locks and so am gunshy to use on system tables), and has the following set (assuming db1 and db2 are your databases): @Databases = ‘db1, db2’, @Indexes = ‘db1.cdc.%, db2.cdc.%’, @MSShippedObjects = ‘Y’. The only required parameter for the IndexOptimize stored procedure is the first one, which specifies which database(s) you want the maintenance performed on. It will be great if someone could explain it. This section of the script creates a table called CommandLog, that is used for logging. If you have a question about an unrelated topic, go to a place that specializes in answering them, and that would be Stack. Since all the jobs are similar (except for the stored procedure name and the parameters used), this will be the only job I explain in depth. I was looking for an option to exclude a system table where it gets stuck. Try to modify that value as per your need. To learn more about tokens, look up “Using Token in Job Steps” in Books Online. On a 2 TB Database using Ola Hallengren’s script with MAXDOP=8 most of the tables are quicker when doing a rebuild rather than a reorganise. We have a 10TB database and we use Ola Hallengren maintenance plan for rebuilding the indexes. Note that I raised the fragmentation thresholds by a lot, and I removed the offline rebuild operations. This job analyzes all of the indexes in all of your user databases, and based on the size of the indexes, and the fragmentation level of the databases, determines if the index should be ignored, reorganized, or rebuilt. Another thing we do in light of occasional deadlocks is to set deadlock priority to low when launching IndexOptimize…it’s a strategic decision we’ve made that we’d rather index maintenance fail on an index one night (and the DBAs get notified) than a more visible business process get deadlocked and a larger group of folks get concerned and involved. Hi , We are seeing lock timeout for indexes in job history for this and the job is been failing for 2 weeks now. If you want to do this, you will have to alter one of the four jobs so that it performs all four tasks, and then delete the remaining three you don’t need, as the script does not provide this option. Honestly, I wouldn’t be doing defrags on a regular basis on a table of this size. I don’t care how big your shop is or how many database servers you manage, building a solution that helps you scale is good practice. If you have deployed Ola’s SQL agent jobs then the output is written to a text file if you provided a valid path when deploying them. This could just be something that you can survive with nothing but a re-org, too. There are some tables we just let fragment out to 99% and deal with the page splits, the white space, etc. Do these weekly, or do them more often with the index parameters turned “off” (set to null): EXECUTE dbo.IndexOptimize @Databases = ‘USER_DATABASES’, @FragmentationLow = NULL, @FragmentationMedium = NULL, @FragmentationHigh = NULL, @UpdateStatistics = ‘ALL’ Or is this a “it depends” situation? The appropriate index maintenance (reorganize or rebuild) is then performed for each partition. Give it some room to breathe. What are your thoughts on performing index maintenance on your system Dbs? The other purpose of Ola’s script is running Update Statistics. In figure 5  and 6 below, you see the available parameters.. The job usually runs in 10 seconds. For someone with a small number of databases, it might be overengineering. And lastly, though I was reluctant to do so, I carefully added some well-documented code to IndexOptimize to basically stall in a WAITFOR loop for certain conditions…if the affected database is having a full backup at the same time, or if the (non-simple recovery) database in question has 90% or greater t-log used, and only 2 or less autogrowths are possible on the log drive. Jon – for support, you’re best off contacting Ola. Generally speaking, I schedule my log backups to occur every hour (or more often), depending on my needs. Because the system databases are generally small, running this job should not take long. After the project was completed, Ola realized that his solution would be useful to other DBAs, so starting January 1, 2008, Ola released his first version of his database maintenance script, offering it free to any organization who wants to use it. It does take longer (could take a really long time), results in greater I/O utilization, and possibly requires increased tempdb space, but the results are better. I’m not saying I never rebuild indexes offline – I just don’t want to do that by default, with nobody around. I have made the assumption that you understand what the various parameters do, or at least that you can look them up. otherwise is working normally with this, –ALTER INDEX ALL ON Person.StateProvince –REORGANIZE; Mokadar — It’s probably a very small table. But a good place to start would be to dial back on the frequency…once a day, for example…and then analyse the CommandLog table and figure out where you are seeing fragmentation building up. After the project was completed, Ola realized that his solution would be useful to other DBAs, so starting January 1, 2008, Ola released his first version of his database maintenance script, offering it free to any organization who wants to use it. All of the other settings have default values and should meet the needs of most database environments. I ran Ola’s index maintenance and found out that when running sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats with DETAILED keyword after running Ola’s script the index still had 100% average fragmentation! The ability to automatically create jobs that implement each of the above tasks. To do this, download the script and open it up in a query window of SSMS, and follow along as I discuss it. I teach SQL Server training classes, or if you haven’t got time for the pain, I’m available for consulting too. I frequently help clients setup and configure the Ola Hallengren SQL Server Maintenance Solution. Someone may have created a unique clustered index on that view or something tricky like that. Yeah, pretty much – if you reach the halfway point, a rollback might end up running outside of your maintenance window. Also, I may want to run stats at different times… another reason to create another job. We will see an example of this later in the article. -- Specify the database in which the objects will be created. There’s a typo on that page (determined by comparing with previous versions of the article) that seems to indicate that limited mode against heaps scans the data pages, but as I understand it only scans the meta-data type pages (PFS and IAM). We set it to ‘Y’ and saw huge gains on relatively quiet databases when testing it out. Regarding Ramakant Dadhichi I have similar results and here is what I have found: As an example I have an index (page count > 45000) that I was looking. Indicate, as a percentage, how much of a table is gathered when updating statistics. Your email address will not be published. This way, whenever you execute it without any parameters, it will inherit the defaults you set at creation time. He has been working with SQL Server since 2001. Just wondering if anyone else had encountered that issue (BTW: my setting is @Databases = ‘USER_DATABASES’,). Active 1 month ago. This is considered Medium fragmentation. We have been using this script on our SQL servers for months now, and the index optimize job is the only one I can’t figure out. Ramakant – how are you checking for fragmentation, and are you using the same minimums for object size that you’re using with Ola’s scripts? We have scheduled the maintenance job weekly through SQL Server Agent. At first glance, this appears complicated. For the moment, if you are not familiar with the sqlcmd utility or tokens, don’t worry, as I will be showing an example of how they are used as I explain how the first maintenance job works. 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