Chad Callihan invokes Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:
Generally speaking, it’s best to put things away that aren’t being used. Don’t keep indexes that aren’t getting utilized because they are taking up disk space and still have to be kept up to date with changes. A table is still loaded up with old data that’s not being used but needs kept? Maybe it’s time for options like an archive database or partitioning.
While it’s not on the same level of importance, one related argument I’ve seen and been in is how to handle temp tables in stored procedures. Do you drop them at the end of a stored procedure or do you leave them to be cleaned up by SQL Server? Is one way better for performance than the other? Let’s do some testing and see what we find out.
Read on for the answer.