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Building a Series of T-SQL Statements via Regular Expression

Andy Levy now has two problems:

Earlier this year, I embarked on a bit of a project to tidy up the indexes in a sizeable database. This database has over 900 tables, and there are quite a few indexes which I have long suspected don’t need to exist for a variety of reasons. Some indexes are redundant, others don’t get used, still others could be combined into a single index. By reducing the number of indexes, we can improve write performance in the database, and the size of the database itself. But we have to do it carefully.

Read on for an example of how you can use a regular expression to take text in one form (DatabaseName.SchemaName.IndexName, for example) and convert it into a T-SQL script.