Question

I am building a database on SQL Server.

This DB is going to be really huge.
However, there are few tables which need to be queried very frequently and are quite small.
Is there a way to cache these tables in RAM for faster querying ?

Any ideas/links to make the database insertions/query faster will be highly appreciated.
Also, do I get any performance boost if I migrate from SQL Express to SQL Server Enterprise ?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

SQL server will do an outstanding job of keeping small tables that are frequently accessed in RAM.

However, a small frequently accessed table does sound like a good candidate for caching at the application layer to avoid ever hitting the database.

If your database really is “huge”, you will hit the 1GB RAM limit of SQL Express (and/or the 10GB per DB storage limitation) and will want an edition that does not have that constraint.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993(v=SQL.110).aspx