RedGate SQL Index Manager BETA

I recently attended the first micro training event with Red Gate where Grant Fritchey demonstrated a BETA tool called SQL Index Manager.  This tool is aimed at the accidental DBA or for those like me who are just lazy.  🙂

It is basically a nice GUI to return your index fragmentation level and makes a recommendation whether you should rebuild or reorganize your index.  An extra nice feature is the ability to fix them right then and there or the tool will generate the TSQL code for you to execute later either manually in SSMS or you can through it into a job. 

A much better long term solution though is to utilize Ola Hallengren maintenance script or the one I like to use written by Michelle Ufford.  Even with me having weekly jobs to interrogate my indexes I have been playing with the SQL Index Manager and taking a look at my databases each day during the week to see how much fragmentation is occuring.  What I have noticed is a few volital tables that could use a mid week or nighly reorg.  Fortunately most of these are tables used in various back end operations and do not impact my end users.

I give this tool two thumbs up and would recommend everyone to download it now while it is free and give it a try.  Keep in mind that this is a BETA release.  This product came out of the down tools week so this product was built quickly but I haven’t found to many bugs other than the random crash here and there.  It is still more stable than most Windows OS’s I have worked on. 

Check out RedGate SQL Index Manager