Set a reservepagegap value to reduce storage fragmentation, thus also reducing the frequency of maintenance activities such as running reorg rebuild and recreating indexes for some tables. Good performance on data-only-locked tables requires good data clustering on the pages, extents, and allocation units used by the table.
The clustering of data and index pages in physical storage stays high as long as there is space nearby for storing forwarded rows and rows that are inserted in index key order. Use the reservepagegap space management property to reserve empty pages for expansion when additional pages need to be allocated.
Row and page cluster ratios are usually 1.0, or very close to 1.0, immediately after you create a clustered index on a table or immediately after you run reorg rebuild. However, future data modifications may cause row forwarding and require allocation of additional data and index pages to store inserted rows.
You can set the reserve page gap on the data and index layer pages for allpages and data-only-locked tables.
