Defragging Indexes Without Losing Index Stats - Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I discussed synchronizing index maintenance and index usage statistics logging as an important part of a DBA's performance tuning routine and the script for saving a database's index usage statistics. This part of the series will go into the query that both identifies the indexes that are fragmented and dynamically generates the defrag scripts.

Defragging Indexes Without Losing Index Stats - Part 2

In my last post, I introduced the concept of synchronizing index maintenance and index usage statistics logging as an important part of a DBA's performance tuning routine. In this post I will start delving into the individual scripts involved.

UPDATE: The full script (see link at end of post) has been both updated and tested (a bit)
                  I've also augmented the script below to clean up the atblIndexUsageStats table.

As a recap, below are the main steps involved:

1. Log Index usage stats
2. Determine which indexes need defragging and generate scripts
3. Generate update statistics scripts based on step 2
4. Log defrag operation to maintenance history table
5. Execute defrag and update stats scripts
6. Cleanup logging tables (optional)

Defragging Indexes Without Losing Index Stats - Part 1

Introduction

As part of my regular performance tuning and maintenance schedule I rely heavily on queries that interrogate the DMV sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats. Based on this DMV I can judge whether indexes should be removed, modified or left as they are. See my previous blog post on SQL Server DMVs. I also believe in the regular defragging of indexes in a database (although I recently read a post from Brent Ozar challenging this idea, but if your servers don’t have the RAM required for such caching as his article suggests and/or you'll never get the budget to upgrade, you’ll need to keep reading). 

Answer to the Partitioned Index Puzzle

A few weeks ago I posted a description of an error I encountered when creating a partitioned index on a SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition instance. It had me quite literally tearing my hair out. The error was a typically vague Microsoft one:

Msg 4436, Level 16, State 12, Line 1

UNION ALL view 'PartWindow.dbo.vwPartitionedView' is not updatable because a partitioning column was not found.

I spent quite a few hours staring at my SQL statements and re-reading documentation before the solution hit me.

If you haven't had a chance to read the post, please do before you skip down to the answer. It was, unfortunately, a total "duh!" moment. But at the same time quite easy to overlook.