Sql-server – Defragmenting SQL Server data and log files live with MoveFile API

fragmentationsql server

My employer is looking at deploying NTFS defragmentation software that uses the Windows MoveFile API to defragment open files. This would get deployed to thousands of SQL Server servers running SQL versions from 2005-2012 and Windows versions from 2003 and 2008 R2. If it matters, the product I'm talking about is PerfectDisk, but I believe there are similar programs that work the same way.

Testing so far hasn't turned up many problems aside from occasional I/O performance issues, which is no surprise and can be worked around by rescheduling & tuning the defragmentation. However, I'm more concerned about the risk of data corruption.

Does anyone here have experience with running this type of software in production on database servers? Did you experience any data corruption?

I'm rather uneasy about this despite being unable to find any solid evidence that it poses a problem.

Thanks for any replies.

Edited to add: This horrible idea was thankfully just forgotten about, possibly in part due to some of the warnings I gave.

Best Answer

Personally, I wouldn't want any antivirus or defrag software anywhere near a database file. Ask yourself, is this going to cause more problems than it's going to solve?

From A tale of CHECKDB failures cause by 3rd party file-system drivers:

At the end of last week, Diskeeper 2009 was upgraded to Diskeeper 2010 on the servers by our server team. Diskeeper 2009 had been there for at least a year without problems so who would have expected it to be the issue. Turns out the new version has an option enabled called IntelliWrite that causes this problem to occur. Disabling this option immediately resolve the problem. Paul blogged about this problem a long time ago, and recalled reading this when I clicked on it but it was the last thing that I would have thought about.

From Beware 3rd party file-system drivers with DBCC CHECKDB

I don't want to cry 'wolf' here, but be careful of attributing massive corruption problems to the real IO subsystem if there's any kind of file-system filter driver installed.

With proper planning and management, you shouldn't need to defrag your database files.

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