Index Maintenance

Welcome back on the SQL Trail, compañeros. Does the thought of setting up your index maintenance plan keep you up at night? Are you looking for ways to make the job easier? In this episode of the SQL Data Partners Podcast, I talk to Sean McCown about Minion Software and the care and feeding of indexes. We also chat about his fragmentation and fill factor preferences, how and when to rebuild, and the ways that T-SQL could be improved.

Listen to Learn

  • The difference between index rebuilds and index reorganization
  • The aggressive fill factor percentages Sean suggests
  • Why he dislikes most maintenance plans
  • Why a firm maintenance window is unnecessary with Minion Software
  • The default settings Sean recommends for maintenance plans
  • The link between CD cases and SQL Server
  • Why Books Online is wrong
  • The T-SQL features that Sean could live without
  • The most useless superpower ever

This episode is sponsored by COZYROC

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Our Guest

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Sean McCown

Sean McCown is a DBA, international speaker, and Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server with over 20 years of experience in high-end databases. He is also founder and co-owner of MinionWare LLC, creator and author of the wildly popular Minion Maintenance and Minion Enterprise tools.

SeanMcCown on Calendly and LinkedIn, @HeyMinionWare on Twitter.

…I figured I had to go by something that I knew I would be comfortable knowing that someone who was a sys admin was going to drop this tool in their shop, not know how to configure it, and not care to configure it, and not have any maintenance at all.

Sean McCown

Meet the Hosts

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Carlos Chacon

With more than 10 years of working with SQL Server, Carlos helps businesses ensure their SQL Server environments meet their users’ expectations. He can provide insights on performance, migrations, and disaster recovery. He is also active in the SQL Server community and regularly speaks at user group meetings and conferences. He helps support the free database monitoring tool found at databasehealth.com and provides training through SQL Trail events.

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Eugene Meidinger

Eugene works as an independent BI consultant and Pluralsight author, specializing in Power BI and the Azure Data Platform. He has been working with data for over 8 years and speaks regularly at user groups and conferences. He also helps run the GroupBy online conference.

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Kevin Feasel

Kevin is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and proprietor of Catallaxy Services, LLC, where he specializes in T-SQL development, machine learning, and pulling rabbits out of hats on demand. He is the lead contributor to Curated SQL, president of the Triangle Area SQL Server Users Group, and author of the books PolyBase Revealed (Apress, 2020) and Finding Ghosts in Your Data: Anomaly Detection Techniques with Examples in Python (Apress, 2022). A resident of Durham, North Carolina, he can be found cycling the trails along the triangle whenever the weather's nice enough.

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