Recently we ran a script to our production DB that would dynamically drop and recreate hundreds of indexes as filtered indexes. While this script had run perfectly in all other previous tests, now after this one the SQL Server query plan cache is behaving oddly.
Execution planner reveals that wrong indexes are being used wrongly that return millions of rows, when only a few should match. When the indexes are correct, the execution plan shows that SQL Server resolves to use index Scan as opposed to index Seek providing much less than optimal results. With tablehints like WITH(INDEX(indexname)) or WITH(FORCESEEK) in the proper places, this can be corrected. INNER LOOP JOIN also fixes some of these.
However, the problem is that even when these new, filtered indexes are dropped and recreated as they were before, the query plan remains the same. Query plan cache has been cleared, DB has been restored to a different environment, statistics have been updated and obviously the indexes have been rebuilt so they're not fragmented.
This is currently a critical issue that nobody has any idea how to fix. While we can force SQL Server to use the correct plans, it's simply not a solution to the multitude of software that would have to be updated with it, and obviously a DB where you need to manually point out how to handle queries is not an option.
So any help would be greatly appreciated.
Edit: We managed to fix one query by dropping the indexes, recreating them again as filtered, then running an UPDATE STATISTICS tablename WITH FULLSCAN. This fixed some of the problem and two joins were working correctly. After this we had to do a separate alter to a multi-column index that was in no way involved in the original index script, to include one of the columns used in the join. These two changes together enabled the query planner to resolve to use the correct indexes with Seek rather than Scan.
The theory right now is that due to an earlier crash, the DB was apparently restored by deleting the underlying DB and then creating a new one from backup, rather than just using REPLACE as before. This would have somehow disconnected masterdb's metadata such as execution plans, all cache and whatnot from the DB resulting in a new massive database with no existing plans to handle queries. This, grouped with an apparently failed statistics update on the newly created indexes would have produced a scenario where SQL Server had no idea how to resolve the various queries it was being bombarded with.
I'm not convinced however that this will still be enough, since some of the behavior such as having to alter the multi-column index, and the fact that no statistics update was ever necessary in any of the prior testing environments in the past 2 months of testing, seems to let on that there's something else that has gone wrong.
