For BI data warehouse databases, since the data does not change much and they typically require a lot of space, it makes a lot of sense to compress the indexes to save space.

I came across some BI databases whose indexes were created without compression. We are in the process of migrating those databases to a new server so I took this opportunity to completely rebuild those indexes with PAGE compression.

Two things are of interest:

• Index rebuild starts from the smallest to the largest. The rational is that during one index rebuild, it needs roughly twice of the actual index size. If we start with the largest index, it may need to expand the file size unnecessarily. On the other hand, if we start with the smallest one, there might be enough space inside to accommodate that rebuild. Once that rebuild is done, more space will be saved, leaving more room for the next rebuild. This way we’ll be able to accommodate index rebuild with no or minimal additional space requirement;
• Re-indexing is done on a new server, therefore there are no or very few connections to it, so the script defines the MAXDOP parameter, to hopefully make the process faster.

[code language=”sql”]
SELECT
s.Name AS SchemaName,
t.NAME AS TableName,
i.name AS IndexName,
‘ALTER INDEX ‘ + i.name + ‘ ON ‘ + s.name + ‘.’ + t.name + ‘ REBUILD WITH (SORT_IN_TEMPDB = ON, DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE, MAXDOP = 20);’ AS AlterIndex,
SUM(a.total_pages) * 8 AS TotalSpaceKB,
SUM(a.used_pages) * 8 AS UsedSpaceKB,
(SUM(a.total_pages) – SUM(a.used_pages)) * 8 AS UnusedSpaceKB
FROM
sys.tables t
INNER JOIN
sys.schemas s ON s.schema_id = t.schema_id
INNER JOIN
sys.indexes i ON t.OBJECT_ID = i.object_id
INNER JOIN
sys.partitions p ON i.object_id = p.OBJECT_ID AND i.index_id = p.index_id
INNER JOIN
sys.allocation_units a ON p.partition_id = a.container_id
WHERE
t.NAME NOT LIKE ‘dt%’
AND t.is_ms_shipped = 0
AND i.OBJECT_ID > 255
AND i.index_id > 0
GROUP BY
s.Name, t.Name, i.name
ORDER BY
UsedSpaceKB
[/code]