SQL Index space and unused table space

Question

I've got a table in a SQL database that has a large unused space that corresponds to the amount of space allocated to indexes

I was working on this by running a reindex on the specific table, but I'm running into space issues and I'm not sure if my approach is effective.

Answer 1

If I understand it correctly, unused space refers to entire pages in extents that have been allocated but not used. You could something like this if you bulk load with a small batch size with minimal logging.

Note that if you have pages that only have one or two rows them, they are entirely included in reserved.

Since this is a vendor system, I would not do anything without approval of the vendor. If you mess things up, that support case would not be fun.

But you try the exercise in a copy of the database on a different server. I would also be interested in just dropping an recreating the XML indexes. Not that they may be the culprit, but they are "special" here.