Question

I have an sql server 2008 database along with 30000000000 records in one of its major tables. Now we are looking for the performance for our queries. We have done with all indexes. I found that we can split our database tables into multiple partitions, so that the data will be spread over multiple files, and it will increase the performance of the queries.

But unfortunatly this functionality is only available in the sql server enterprise edition, which is unaffordable for us.

Is there any way to opimize for the query performance? For example, the query

select * from mymajortable where date between '2000/10/10' and '2010/10/10'

takes around 15 min to retrieve around 10000 records.

Answer 1

A SELECT * will obviously be less efficiently served than a query that uses a covering index.

First step: examine the query plan and look for and table scans and the steps taking the most effort(%)

If you don’t already have an index on your ‘date’ column, you certainly need one (assuming sufficient selectivity). Try to reduce the columns in the select list, and if ‘sufficiently’ few, add these to the index as included columns (this can eliminate bookmark lookups into the clustered index and boost performance).

You could break your data up into separate tables (say by a date range) and combine via a view.

It is also very dependent on your hardware (# cores, RAM, I/O subsystem speed, network bandwidth)

Suggest you post your table and index definitions.