I was talking with a colleague recently who uses a canned application to assist in his daily work. The application uses SQL Server, granting him a them a lot of opportunity to extend their understanding and mining of the data.
The problem they are experiencing is that the database is slow, and continues to get slower as it accumulates more data. That’s the nature of most database systems. Out of the gate they work pretty good because there lack of data allows inefficient or missing indexes or statistics to be overcome by brute force.
As performance of the canned product decreases they have had to back off on the idea of adding more load against the database by mining data when the system is already under stress.
Where would you start if they asked you for help? Are there any particular reports you would run to help determine what measures you could take to increase performance? Share your thoughts here and don’t worry if this isn’t your thing. We won’t bite. Leave a comment or drop an Email to btaylor@sswug.org. I’ll share some ideas tomorrow as well.
Cheers,
Ben