How to rebuild all the indexes of a database in SQL Server

In one of my previous articles, I talked about Index Fragmentation in SQL Server in terms of how to track it and how to resolve it. In this post, we are going to see how to rebuild all the indexes of a database in SQL Server.

The techniques explained in that post provided ways of reorganizing/rebuilding specific indexes or all the indexes within a given table. But what about when the DBA needs to rebuild all the indexes within a database? How can he achieve this?

It is a fact that in some cases where a large amount of indexes in a database on SQL Server has a large percentage of fragmentation, then the recommended approach is to rebuild those indexes. To this end, in the worst scenario, the DBA will need to rebuild the indexes in all the tables of the database.

My previous post on the topic explained ways of rebuilding specific or all the indexes within a table.

Under normal circumstances there is not a direct way allowing to rebuild all the indexes of a database with a single command. A workaround is to run different rebuild statements for each table.

Though, I know that workarounds are not very desirable in many cases as they might demand a large amount of time 🙂

There is not need to worry 🙂 In SQL Server there is the undocumented stored procedure sp_MSforeachtable which allows for recursively executing a T-SQL statement (or more) for all the tables within a database with the use of a single line of code.

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Below I propose the syntax on how to rebuild all the indexes of a given database by utilizing the sp_MSforeachtable stored procedure.

--Rebuild all indexes with keeping the default fill factor for each index
USE [DATABASE_NAME]
EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1="print '?' DBCC DBREINDEX ('?')"

--Rebuild all indexes with specifying the fill factor
USE [DATABASE_NAME]
EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1="print '?' DBCC DBREINDEX ('?', ' ', [FILL_FACTOR_PERC])"

 

SQL Server 2005 or later:

You can either use the syntax provided above for SQL Server 2000 or:

--Rebuild all indexes online with keeping the default fill factor for each index
USE [DATABASE_NAME]
EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1="print '?'", @command2="ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD WITH (ONLINE=ON)"

--Rebuild all indexes offline with keeping the default fill factor for each index
USE [DATABASE_NAME]
EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1="print '?'", @command2="ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD WITH (ONLINE=OFF)"
--Rebuild all indexes online with specifying the fill factor
USE [DATABASE_NAME]
EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1="print '?'", @command2="ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD WITH (FILLFACTOR=[FILL_FACTOR_PERC],ONLINE=ON)"

--Rebuild all indexes offline with specifying the fill factor
USE [DATABASE_NAME]
EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1="print '?'", @command2="ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD WITH (FILLFACTOR=[FILL_FACTOR_PERC],ONLINE=OFF)"

Considerations:

DBCC DBREINDEX is always an offline operation.
Online index rebuild fails for the following cases:

• XML index
• Spatial index
• Large object data type columns: image, text, ntext, varchar(max), nvarchar(max), varbinary(max), and xml

 

I hope you found this article useful. Drop me a line if you have any comments or questions!