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SQL version: 2017 Standard x64 OS: Windows Server 2016 Datacenter (10.0)

I've just created some minimal indexes on ETL tables which were previously heaps with no indexes. Both R and W performance have improved. Thought I'd keep on eye on index fragmentation, so I'm looking at sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats: in DETAILED mode simply to learn more about this area. I'm an experienced DWH developer rather than a DBA, so my questions may be very beginner to DBAs (there is no DBA here, or they'd be taking care of this).

The index I'm looking at is a clustered unique index. This table has 1.3m rows. At the leaf level (0) I see .89% fragmentation: good. At higher levels though there is fragmentation. Index has levels 0-3. At level 2 fragmentation is 52%, fragment_count=23, record_count=2781.

This is confusing me, especially as I only created the index yesterday.

  1. Is fragmentation at non-leaf levels a performance concern?
  2. How can there be so much fragmentation at level 2 already?
  3. In a clustered index, what do non-leaf (>0) levels in the B-tree actually store? It can't be row data as in level 0: is it a pointer to a set of lower index entries?
  4. If I'm right about 3, it would seem a trivial job to reorganise/rebuild an upper level of a B-tree, e.g. one with only 2781 records, without going near the heavy-duty work of reorganising the leaf level. But I can't see any mention of a way to do this.
  5. What does fragment_count actually mean, especially at higher levels? The documentation only says that logical fragmentation is "the percentage of out-of-order pages in the leaf pages of an index". Is fragment_count a count of contiguous areas of the index, which are in-order internally?

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  1. No. Non-leaf index pages are particularly likely to stay in cache. In principle, it might slow down read-ahead a little (upper levels are used to drive this) the first time an index scan with read-ahead occurs, but meh. Some people regard fragmentation at any level a normal thing and not something to worry about if the data is usually already in memory or if the storage subsystem has low latency and good throughput.
  2. Because SQL Server doesn't go out of its way to avoid it. Non-leaf pages can experience page splits too. Padding the index above the leaf (PAD_INDEX) is possible but rarely worthwhile.
  3. The clustered index key(s) and any uniquifier.
  4. This isn't implemented.
  5. I believe it is a count of the number of contiguous areas at that level of the index, yes.

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