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.