Question

I’m designing table that will server as snapshot of data that rarely changes to address performance issues… Anyway, it has to be as fast as it gets. Some time ago I used to do similar thing with MySQL and in that database engine it was beneficial in terms of performance to design table with constant row length (no NULL columns + storing strings in nchar). Is it the same with SQL Server ?

Thanks,Pawel

Answer 1

did you use the myisam table format?

if so, the records are really the same length (and retrieving a record is simple for the database: headersize + (recordsize * recordnumber) – > really dammned fast (of course, after reading the index …)

afaik the mssql server uses a “paged” storage format – if so, you will gain no performance boost.