What is the best way to refresh a rollup table under load?

Question

I created a table in my SQL Server 2005 database and populated it with summary and calculated values. The purpose is to avoid extensive joins and groupings on every call to

Answer 1

It depends on the relationships in your database and the queries you run against it.

If it's a summary table that can tolerate stale data, you could populate it using queries that perform their SELECTs without locks using the NOLOCK join hint. NOTE: use of the NOLOCK hint should only be done when you are sure of the consequences.

There is often scope for re-tuning indexes, to reduce loading.