Hear me out - Don't go offline because of your index deployment strategy

Creating and/or altering indexes need some upfront preparation. These actions have an even bigger importance when dealing with busy systems where we can't afford or want to avoid big blocking operations or, even worse, downtimes.

Most recent versions of SQL Server introduced new options (mainly in the Enterprise edition) that make it possible to minimize or even avoid problems like these to happen.

In this session, I will be sharing with you a couple of real-life stories on why overlooking some of the available options, but not ON by default, can result in slower or stopped systems. We will also understand how we can mitigate that by combining these options to achieve our goal and avoid problems.