Higher level of fragmentation and data corruption.

CAN maintaining higher level of fragmentation result in data corruption over
time? OR they are totally unrelated.
I would like to know because rebuilding indexes take resources and that is
an issue for a 24 x 7 environment. In other words, should we keep data device
safely fragmented for sometime if we have some hard disk space available that
allows us to maintain some abnormal growth, allowing us not to rebuild
indexes?
Can someone with SQL Server Internal Data Storage Knowledge please reply?
Also, please let me know if my question is not very clear enough and you
need further explanation.
Regards,
MZeeshan
Fragmentation in and of itself should not cause data corruption. Most
corruption these days is due to hardware issues and not the database itself.
I don't get what you are stating about the extra space and abnormal growth.
Are you staying you have lots of page splits and that is causing your data
size to increase? If so you do not have the clustered index on the right
column or you need to adjust your fill factor.
Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP
"MZeeshan" <mzeeshan@.community.nospam> wrote in message
news:DEC26292-C91A-4DD6-B001-E362FC320E63@.microsoft.com...
> CAN maintaining higher level of fragmentation result in data corruption
> over
> time? OR they are totally unrelated.
> I would like to know because rebuilding indexes take resources and that is
> an issue for a 24 x 7 environment. In other words, should we keep data
> device
> safely fragmented for sometime if we have some hard disk space available
> that
> allows us to maintain some abnormal growth, allowing us not to rebuild
> indexes?
> Can someone with SQL Server Internal Data Storage Knowledge please reply?
> Also, please let me know if my question is not very clear enough and you
> need further explanation.
> --
> Regards,
> MZeeshan
|||Inline...
Paul Randal
Dev Lead, Microsoft SQL Server Storage Engine
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
"MZeeshan" <mzeeshan@.community.nospam> wrote in message
news:DEC26292-C91A-4DD6-B001-E362FC320E63@.microsoft.com...
> CAN maintaining higher level of fragmentation result in data corruption
over
> time? OR they are totally unrelated.
>
Absolutely not - they are unrelated. Corruption is caused by hardware
problems (and highly-infrequent bugs in various layers of software and
firmware, obviously)

> I would like to know because rebuilding indexes take resources and that is
> an issue for a 24 x 7 environment. In other words, should we keep data
device
> safely fragmented for sometime if we have some hard disk space available
that
> allows us to maintain some abnormal growth, allowing us not to rebuild
> indexes?
> Can someone with SQL Server Internal Data Storage Knowledge please reply?
I'm your man. What are you trying to achieve? Minimal space usage, minimal
perf drop from disk/index fragmentation? Are you correlating a perf drop
with increasing fragmentation, or are you just worried about it?

> Also, please let me know if my question is not very clear enough and you
> need further explanation.
> --
> Regards,
> MZeeshan