A couple of years ago I wrote about a poster on the OTN db forum who was puzzled by the fact that when he started rebuilding tables they got bigger. (Bad luck, sometimes that’s what happens !)
A few days ago a related question appeared: I rebuilt some indexes and my query got slower. (Bad luck, sometimes that’s what happens – again!)
If you rebuild an index it’s physically different and its statistics are different. Plans can change and go slower because the index stats look sufficiently different; plans can stay the same and go slower because the index is physically different.
I’ve added a couple of comments to the thread – there may still be some further mileage in it.
