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.

This is a demo-based session where I will be showing the pitfalls and sharing the options you can use to help avoid them.

Also, along the way, I will tell you a couple of real-life stories on how and why things went wrong and made systems slower or even stopped.