we have a database table which has around 200,000 records. which includes 3 ntext columns, which hold string data with length vary from 4000-70000. but a mere selection on the table takes more than 1 minute to return data. and even using where condition, and indexes to select 12000 records for a condition it takes 40 sec.
so we decided to change those data types to nvarchar(max), but still did not notice a major difference, as it would store data out of the row since its too long. is there any better way i can improve this performance of my table ?
You should make the columns nvarchar instead of ntext, and you could include them in the index as nonkey columns. But… that’s a lot of data you’re fetching. If you need to perform the query so often that the 1 minute execution time is a problem then maybe you should rethink your approach.