Alex,

> However, it sounds like rebuilding an index cannot require more
> space that the database size itself, right?

Correct, in order to build the index, the engine must build and sort a projection of the index values.

So, if you build an index on a string [say varchar(100)] column which is only sparsely populated (avg usage = 10 char) then it is reasonable/expected that the index will be much larger than the war data storage.


Sean