Consider thinking of index maintenance as part of your storage mapping layer. Basically you have redundant storage plans for the same schema. There is nothing p

Consider thinking of index maintenance as part of your storage mapping layer. Basically you have redundant storage plans for the same schema. There is nothing particularly special about primary row indexes - that is just one physical representation of your schema, as are all indexes. You could have, say, a column oriented representation of the same data instead, or a covering index, or all of the above.