Thanks for the great article.

We do index rebuilds every two weeks, and Fill Factor plays an important role.

I have found that the "magic number" for FF would be the amount of index space that needs to be available between index rebuilds. Our indexes grow approximately 4% per week (8% every two weeks), so I have a FF of 90%.

Theoretically, that keeps the system with 2% to 10% of free space in the index pages at any given time. From a general performance standpoint, you never want 100% page usage in a database that is written to. (This would be optimal in a read-only scenario.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg on a huge topic, and proper index maintenance can sometimes make or break the performance of a set of data.

Well, that's my two cents!

Happy Holidays!

-John