Reduce SQL Server table fragmentation without adding/dropping a clustered index?

Question

I have a large database (90GB data, 70GB indexes) that\'s been slowly growing for the past year, and the growth/changes has caused a large amount of internal fragmentation not o

Answer 1

The problem that no one is talking about is FRAGMENTATION OF THE DATA OR LOG DEVICE FILES ON THE HARD DRIVE(s) ITSELF!! Everyone talks about fragmentation of the indexes and how to avoid/limit that fragmentation.

FYI: When you create a database, you specify the INITIAL size of the .MDF along with how much it will grow by when it needs to grow. You do the same with the .LDF file. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE THAT WHEN THESE TWO FILES GROW THAT THE DISK SPACE ALLOCATED FOR THE EXTRA DISK SPACE NEEDED WILL BE PHYSICALLY CONTIGUOUS WITH THE EXISTING DISK SPACE ALLOCATED!!

Every time one of these two device files needs to expand, there is the possibility of fragmentation of the hard drive disk space. That means the heads on the hard drive need to work harder (and take more time) to move from one section of the hard drive to another section to access the necessary data in the database. It is analogous to buying a small plot of land and building a house that just fits on that land. When you need to expand the house, you have no more land available unless you buy the empty lot next door - except - what if someone else, in the meantime, has already bought that land and built a house on it? Then you CANNOT expand your house. The only possibility is to buy another plot of land in the "neighborhood" and build another house on it. The problem becomes - you and two of your children would live in House A and your wife and third child would live in House B. That would be a pain (as long as you were still married).

The solution to remedy this situation is to "buy a much larger plot of land, pick up the existing house (i.e. database), move it to the larger plot of land and then expand the house there". Well - how do you do that with a database? Do a full backup, drop the database (unless you have plenty of free disk space to keep both the old fragmented database - just in case - as well as the new database), create a brand new database with plenty of initial disk space allocated (no guarantee that the operating system will insure that the space that you request will be contiguous) and then restore the database into the new database space just created. Yes - it is a pain to do but I do not know of any "automatic disk defragmenter" software that will work on SQL database files.