Our project runs a very large, very complicated database. So about a month ago, we noticed that the space used by indexed columns containing null values was getting too large. As a response to that, I wrote as script that would dynamically search through all single-column indexes containing more than 1% of null values, then drop and recreate those indexes as filtered indexes on the condition that the value was NOT NULL. This would drop and recreate hundreds of indexes throughout the database and typically free up almost 15% of the space used by the whole DB.
Now I have two questions about this:
A) What are the downsides of using filtered indexes in this fashion? I would assume that it would only improve performance, but are there any performance risks involved?
B) We received errors ('can't drop index XYZ beause it does not exist or you do not have permission') on dropping and recreating the indexes, even though when checked afterwards, everything had gone exactly as expected. How can this happen?
Thanks for any help!
