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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T00:10:42+00:00

I’m trying to do quite a lot of querying against a Microsoft SQL Server

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I’m trying to do quite a lot of querying against a Microsoft SQL Server that I only have read only access to. My queries are needing to work with the data in very different structure from how the DB architecture is. Since I only have read access, I can’t create views, so I’m looking for a solution.
What I’m currently doing is using complex queries to return the results as I need them, but this is 4-5 table joins with subqueries. It is rediculously slow and resource intensive.
I can see two solutions, but would love to hear about anything I might have missed:

  • Use some sort of “proxy” that caches the data, and creates views around it. This would need some sort of method to determine the dirtiness of the data. (is there something like this?)
  • run my own SQL server, and mirror the data from the source SQL server every X minutes, and then load views on my SQL server.

Any other ideas? or recommendations on these ideas?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you can create a new database on that server you can create the views in the new database. The views can access the data using a three part name. E.g. select * from OtherDB.dbo.Table.

    If you have access to another SQL server, the DBA can created a “Linked Server”. You can then create views that access the data using a four part name. E.g. select * from OtherServer.OtherDB.dbo.Table

    In either case, the data is always “live”, so no need to worry about dirty data.

    The views will bring you cleaner code and a single location to make changes, and few milliseconds of performance benefit from cached execution plans. However, there shouldn’t be in great performance leaps. You mention caching, but as far as I know, the server does not do any particular data caching for ordinary, non-indexed views that it wouldn’t do for ad-hoc queries.

    If you haven’t already done so, you may wish to do experiments to see if the views are actually faster–make a copy of the database and add the views there.

    Edit: I did a similar experiment today. I had a stored proc on Server1 that was getting data from Server2 via a Linked Server. It was a complex query, joining many tables on both servers. I created a view on Server2 that got all of the data that I needed from that server, and updated the proc (on Server1) so that it used that view (via a Linked Server) and then joined the view to a bunch of tables that were on Server1. It was noticeably faster after the update. The reason seems to be that Server1 was miss-estimating the number of rows that it would get from Server2, and thus building a bad plan. It did better estimating when using a view. It didn’t matter if the view was in the same database as the data it was reading, it just had to be on the same server (I only have on instance, so I don’t know how instances would have come into play).

    This particular scenario would only come into play if you were already using Linked Servers to get the data, so it may not be relevant to the original question, but I thought it was interesting since we’re discussing the performance of views.

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