I’m new to working with this much data (20 million rows) and I don’t know what I should expect as far as query duration:
update table set field = '1234'
No index on field. This statement took 25 minutes. The database is set to Simple Recovery. Does 25 minutes seem too long? Table has 9 columns with small data types <50 varchar.
IF you updated 20M rows in one single transaction, then your time was entirely driven by your IO subsystem: what kind of drives you have, what disk files layout etc. If you have 40 spindles in raid 10 with 4 balanced files and a separate similar battery for the log then the result is worryingly slow. If you tested this with one single MDF that shares the spindle with the LDF on a single consumer quality 5000rpm HDD then your time is amazingly fast.