Andrew Pruski demos resumable online index rebuilds in SQL Server 2017:
Pretty cool, huh? Full information on this can be found here: –https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/alter-index-transact-sql
I think this is very useful but we do need to be careful. The documentation says that pausing an online index rebuild for a long time may affect query performance and disk utilisation. This is due to the newly rebuild index being created side-by-side to the original one so we’ll need to watch out for that.
It’s a good first look at what might be a very interesting solution for companies tight on maintenance window time.