While attending SQLCon and FabCon Europe in Barcelona, there were a lot of announcements that caught my attention. But there was one during the SQL keynote that made my DBA ears perk up: Automatic Index Compaction is generally available. And then came the comment that really got my attention: Could this be the beginning of the end of traditional index maintenance? Wait…WHAT? For those of us who have been working with SQL Server for a long time, index maintenance has practically been part of the DBA job description. Check fragmentation. Reorganize. Rebuild. Repeat. And for far too many environments, the strategy has basically been:
It’s Sunday at 2:00 AM. Time to rebuild ALL THE THINGS!
But should we really be doing that?
I’ve been rethinking index maintenance for a while. I’ve said for years that blindly rebuilding indexes isn’t performance tuning. Just because an index is fragmented doesn’t automatically mean it is causing a performance problem. Index maintenance has a cost, statistics matter more. You’re consuming CPU, generating I/O, using transaction log space, and potentially interfering with the workload—all in the name of fixing something that may not actually be hurting you. I’ll never forget the time I was on a trouble call, which included an outage. Shortly into the call a DBA interjected “we need to rebuild all the indexes now”… can you believe it, during the outage, they wanted to do this. Needless to say. I had to mute my face. That’s why this announcement caught my attention.
Microsoft describes Automatic Index Compaction as allowing the platform to handle index bloat instead of relying on a maintenance window and a script. That is a very different approach. Instead of: “It’s Sunday, so let’s rebuild indexes.” We’re moving toward: “Let the platform handle the problem when the problem actually needs handling.” Now THAT is interesting.
Am I Deleting My Index Maintenance Jobs Tomorrow? No. 
And neither should you based solely on a keynote announcement.
There are still a lot of questions I want answered before I’m ready to declare traditional index maintenance dead. I want to understand exactly what SQL Server considers index bloat, when compaction occurs, what workloads benefit most, what overhead it introduces, and how we monitor what it is doing. Most importantly, I want to see it working against real-world workloads. Because that’s where features prove themselves. But I really like the direction they are moving.
What excites me isn’t just this one feature. It’s the direction SQL Server continues to move. We’ve watched Microsoft add more capabilities that allow the engine to recognize problems and make “intelligent” adjustments rather than requiring DBAs to constantly intervene. And I think that’s good for us. It doesn’t eliminate the DBA. It means we can spend less time performing repetitive maintenance simply because that’s how we’ve always done it and more time solving the problems that actually affect our users. If automatic index compaction can eventually eliminate some unnecessary maintenance while maintaining—or improving—performance, I’m absolutely interested.
And I’m definitely going to be testing this one. Stay tuned. Meanwhile check out this great post from Microsoft’s Dimitri Furman.
Next up:
SSMS is getting a LOT smarter—and Copilot Agent Mode may be more useful to DBAs than you think.
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