Why is it necessary to rebuild indexes in the Database
The SQL Server Database Engine automatically modifies indexes whenever insert, update, or delete operations are made to the underlying data. Over time these modifications can cause the information in the index to become scattered in the database (fragmented). Fragmentation exists when indexes have pages in which the logical ordering, based on the key value, does not match the physical ordering inside the data file. Heavily fragmented indexes can degrade query performance and cause your application to respond slowly, especially scan operations.
You can remedy index fragmentation by reorganizing or rebuilding an index. For partitioned indexes built on a partition scheme, you can use either of these methods on a complete index or a single partition of an index.
Rebuilding an index drops and re-creates the index. This removes fragmentation, reclaims disk space by compacting the pages based on the specified or existing fill factor setting, and reorders the index rows in contiguous pages. When ALL is specified, all indexes on the table are dropped and rebuilt in a single transaction.
Reorganizing an index uses minimal system resources. It defragments the leaf level of clustered and nonclustered indexes on tables and views by physically reordering the leaf-level pages to match the logical, left to right, order of the leaf nodes. Reorganizing also compacts the index pages. Compaction is based on the existing fill factor value.
Source:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/indexes/reorganize-and-rebuild-indexes?view=sql-server-2017
