Handling large databases

Question

I have been working in a web project(asp.net) for around six months. The final product is about to go live. The project uses SQL Server as the database. We have done performance

Answer 1

• First make sure your database is reasonably healthy, run DBCC DBREINDEX on it if possible, DBCC INDEXDEFRAG and update statistics if you can't afford the performance hit.

• Run Profiler for a reasonable sample time, enough to capture most of the typical functions, but filter on duration greater than something like 10 seconds, you don't care about the things that only take a few milliseconds, don't even look at those.

• Now that you have your longest running queries, tune the snot out of them; get the ones that show up the most, look at the execution plans in Query Analyzer, take some time to understand them, add indexes where necessary to speed retrieval

• look at creating covered indexes; change the app if needed if it's doing SELECT * FROM... when it only needs SELECT LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME....

• Repeat the profiler sampling, with duration of 5 seconds, 3 seconds, etc. until performance meets your expectations.