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 Heap Fragmentation

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SQLJames
Starting Member

35 Posts

Posted - 2013-09-05 : 16:03:01
Greetings and thank you in advance for your time.

First, it was not my fault or design. I am the lucky one who gets to work with it.

We have a large table with 150M rows. No clustered index. Lots of non-clustered indexes. The table is partitioned on a date column. There are about 150 partitions. Select performance is terrible - big surprise.

I ran a select against sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats where avg_fragmentation_in_percent was greater than 20. Almost every partition was returned so about 150 rows. The avg_fragmentation_in_percent is between 30 and 99 percent. Average of about 95% fragmented. Page counts average about 40K per partition.

I understand the issue with re-org or re-build of indexes on a table to reduce the fragmentation of the indexes. Since this is a heap, there is no index that I can target to rebuild.

How would I go about reducing the avg_fragmentation_in_percent for each of the partition heaps?

Thanks for your consideration!

tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2013-09-05 : 20:03:22
Reorging and rebuilding indexes to fix fragmentation does not generally help with performance. I would suspect missing indexes, out-of-date statistics, poorly written code, hardware bottleneck or other things before even bothering with fragmentation.

What does the execution plans show for the select queries that are performing poorly.

Can a clustered index be added? How wide of a table is it?

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/

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