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Asked: 2026-05-11T14:11:42+00:00

I’ve been asked to troubleshoot performance problems in a SQL Server 2005 database. The

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I’ve been asked to troubleshoot performance problems in a SQL Server 2005 database.

The challenge is not a huge amount of data, but the huge number of tables. There are more than 30,000 tables in a single database. The total data size is about 650 GB.

I don’t have any control over the application that creates all those tables. The application uses roughly 2,500 tables per ‘division’ on a larger company with 10-15 divisions.

How do you even start to check for performance problems? All the articles you find on VLDB (Very Large DB) are about the amount of data, not the amount of tables.

Any ideas? Pointers? Hints?

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  1. As others have noted, the number of tables is probably indicative of a bad design, but it is far from a slam dunk that it is the source of the performance problems.

    The best advice I can give you for any performance optimization is to stop guessing about the source of the problem and go look for it. Above all else, don’t start optimizing until you have positively identified the source of the problem.

    I’d start by running some traces on the database and identify the poor performing queries. This would also tell you which tables are getting used the most by the application. In all likelihood a large number of those tables are probably either: A) leftover temp tables; B) no longer used; or C) working tables someone didn’t clean up.

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