At first, this was going to be a technical article about an index maintenance horror story. I received an off-hours page because the index maintenance job was running for a long time on a big table. I have an agent job setup to use Ola’s scripts, and I made sure to set the thresholds for fragmentation per the examples on the Ola website. All was seeming very good in terms of the agent job setup, but I found a few other problems with standards.
The Problems
One big problem was there was no data retention policy for this large table.