Resumable Online Index Rebuild is in public preview for SQL Server 2017 CTP 2.0

We are delighted to announce that Resumable Online Index Rebuild is now available for public preview in the SQL Server vNext 2017 CTP 2.0 release. With this feature, you can resume a paused index rebuild operation from where the rebuild operation was paused rather than having to restart the operation at the beginning. In addition, this feature rebuilds indexes using only a small amount of log space. You can use the new feature in the following scenarios:

  • Resume an index rebuild operation after an index rebuild failure, such as after a database failover or after running out of disk space. There is no need to restart the operation from the beginning. This can save a significant amount of time when rebuilding indexes for large tables.
  • Pause an ongoing index rebuild operation and resume it later. For example, you may need to temporarily free up system resources to execute a high priority task or you may have a single maintenance window that is too short to complete the operation for a large index. Instead of aborting the index rebuild process, you can pause the index rebuild operation and resume it later without losing prior progress.
  • Rebuild large indexes without using a lot of log space and have a long-running transaction that blocks other maintenance activities. This helps log truncation and avoid out-of-log errors that are possible for long-running index rebuild operations.

Read the articles: The following articles provide detailed and updated information about this feature:

Public preview information: For public preview communication on this topic, please contact the ResumableIDXPreview@microsoft.com alias.

To try SQL Server 2017: Get started with the preview of SQL Server 2017 on macOS, Docker, Windows, and Linux.