Is defragging a W2K3 server running SQL a bad thing to do?

[Strollski13]

I recently started at a new company and was asked to trouble shoot a slow SQL data base server. I checked the drive that the SQL data bases are on and it was 47% fragmented. In the the past what I've done was to defrag the SQL data bases from with in SQL then stop all instances of SQL and defrag the drive using plain old defrag.exe. I know there are commercial defrag utilities but they're not in the budget. I've never had an issue doing this but when I suggested doing that here folks freaked out. Can I get a sanity check? Has any one else had issues running defrag.exe on a Windows Server 2003? Is this not recommended?

Thank you in advance.

 

[technome]

Can't speak for Win OS defrag, as to SQL directly but I have never had a problem with defragmenting drives...

I have defraging software call Diskeeper which does a boot time defrag on ALL files, including normally open SQL files, had no issues after hundreds of runs. Basically defrags SQL with instances/services stopped. From my observations SQL does speed up when defraged.

Diskeeper has a link about defragging SQL....

http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag/dk-boost-sql-server.aspx

........................................
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[58sniper]

Files aren't open at boot time, so the "open file" issue isn't part of that. Boot time defragging is fine if you want the down time associated with it. Most orgs don't want that on a recurring basis, as that affects SLAs.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

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