Minion Reindex 1.0

I got an email the other day from Sean and Jen at Midnight DBA ( www.midnightdba.com ) about their new tool Minion for managing index rebuilds and fragmentation:

With these tools, they have been a little more ambitious in some ways than the tools provided by Ola Hallengren ( https://ola.hallengren.com/ ) that have been our favourite tools for this work. I quite liked many of the concepts they have put into the tool. It still feels a bit version-1.0-ish to me but shows lots of promise. I liked the way that it’s all set up with a single script. I would, however, like to see more error handling, etc. in that script. For example, you should be able to run it twice without errors. With the script I looked at, that’s not possible.

I liked the way they are providing some capture of details from sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats.

For both this tool, and for Ola’s tool, I wish there was more focus on the index usage stats. Rather than basing decisions about rebuilding or reorganizing indexes based only on fragmentation level, I’d like to see details of how the indexes are used (ie: user seeks vs user scans) playing a much larger role in deciding the operations to be performed. Overuse of reindexing is a primary cause of bloated logs, log shipping failures, mirrors that fall behind, etc.

Regardless, it’s great to see a new entrant in this area. I encourage you to check it out, see what you think, and more importantly, provide feedback to them. Sean has recorded a video demo of the product which is also available at the site.

2014-11-04