• I should have thought of that earlier.

    Those aren't indexes. They're automatically created column statistics. The query optimiser creates those to better know the data distribution within a column.

    You can drop them. SQL will recreate them if necessary.

    For each of the entries in sysindexes that begin with _WA_Sys, run the following

    DROP STATISTICS auto.<Statistic Name>

    Statistics can indicate a column where an index would be useful, so you may want to watch which columns get stats and consider creating indexes on them. Also, from what I saw of the column names, your table is highly unnormalised. Is that intentional?

    Gail Shaw
    Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
    SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

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