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Finding Unused Indexes

SQLWayne has a script to help find unused indexes:

Here’s some code that can show you what indexes are unused or empty.  An empty index just means that there’s no data in that table right now, it may always be populated later, so I would not drop an empty index.  Besides, how much space would an empty index take?

For my personal preferences, I order the output by table then index name, also I put a u.* at the end of the select statement so the more interesting usage stat columns can be seen.

If an index truly is unused, it’s a waste of resources.  The problem is, sometimes you’ll think an index is unused but it’s really a vital part of month-end reporting or used for the CEO’s favorite dashboard.