Deletes that Split Pages and Forwarded Ghosts
- by Paul White
Can DELETE operations cause pages to split? Yes. It sounds counter-intuitive on the face of it; deleting rows frees up space on a page, and page splitting occurs when a page needs additional space. Nevertheless, there are circumstances when deleting rows causes them to expand before they can be deleted. The mechanism at work here is row versioning (extract from Books Online below): Isolation Levels The relationship between row-versioning isolation levels (the first bullet point) and page splits is...(read more)