Tag Archives: Partition

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Hello Darkness my old friend, I can talk to you again because my Availability Group is quiet…

We have a lovely Availability Group that holds A LOT of data that is broken into partitions.  We have 42 partitions and they are usually moving information around daily between them.   The index rebuilds on them were making our logs HUGE because the the Availability Group was taking too long to catch up, we tried both Synchronous and Asynchronous mode.  We would see all kinds of errors.  We were doing horrible things like auto shrinking our transaction log after the indexing finished and  ignoring alarms during the time the database was rebuilding.  We had requested more and more space from our storage team and sometimes the job wouldn’t even finish because it ran out of space.  Our first idea was to split out the index rebuilds so that we could do one partition at a time.

It looks like this:


ALTER INDEX IndexName
ON [dbo].Table
REBUILD PARTITION = 42

By splitting this out, we were able to get the job to finish, but with tons of alarms, and log growth.

Then we had a thought, maybe the server is just spinning too fast and we need to give the Availability Group time to catch up.  So we added some simple waits in between each step.


WAITFOR DELAY '00:10';

As an example this is in minutes and will wait for 10 minutes before running the next step.

 

It has now been a quiet week and we are looking forward to the Sound of Silence.

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If Crazy = Genius, I’m rebuilding one partition at a time!

We have had an index job that has been failing for a while.  This is one of those things you really don’t want to clean up because no one is complaining, but you know you should.  I had heard that I could rebuild one partition at a time, but where to start?  Today, I worked my way through it, so here it is so that you can do it too.

First you need to find the biggest indexes, there is a good chance those are the ones that live on partitions. I am removing Primary Keys.


SELECT i.[name] AS IndexName
,SUM(ps.[used_page_count]) * 8 AS IndexSizeKB
FROM sys.dm_db_partition_stats AS ps
INNER JOIN sys.indexes AS i ON ps.[object_id] = i.[object_id]
AND ps.[index_id] = i.[index_id]
WHERE i.name NOT LIKE 'PK%'
GROUP BY i.[name]
ORDER BY IndexSizeKB DESC

The top ones are most likely the ones you want to focus on.  Next, we need to track down the partition function.


SELECT * FROM sys.partition_functions

Next we are going to figure out which partition we want to rebuild.


SELECT sprv.value AS [Value], sprv.boundary_id AS [ID]
FROM sys.partition_functions AS spf
INNER JOIN sys.partition_range_values sprv ON sprv.function_id = spf.function_id
WHERE (spf.name = N'NameOfFunctionFromPartitionFunctions')
ORDER BY [ID] ASC

Pick the number of the partition you want to rebuild.

Next use your index name from earlier.  You will also need the table name and the partition number.


ALTER INDEX [IndexName]
ON [dbo].[TableName]
REBUILD PARTITION = 3

This will rebuild just the partition that you requested.