Resuming Index Operations but Using Different Options

John Morehouse has an interesting use case for resumable indexes:

Documentation on ALTER INDEX provides which options we can set when resuming a rebuild or creation operation:

<resumable_index_option> ::=
 {
    MAXDOP = max_degree_of_parallelism
    | MAX_DURATION =<time> [MINUTES]
    | <low_priority_lock_wait> 
 }

<low_priority_lock_wait>::= 
{ 
    WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY ( MAX_DURATION = <time> [ MINUTES ] ,  
                          ABORT_AFTER_WAIT = { NONE | SELF | BLOCKERS } ) 
} 

This means that we can change the MAXDOP, MAX_DURATION, and WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY.

I’m going to gather that this was not necessarily the original intent, but it’s pretty nice, as it means that you can resume with fewer cores and lower priority during the day, but more cores and higher priority after hours.