What is considered a “large” table in SQL Server?

Question

I have a table with 10 million records in it. Is that considered a lot of records? Should I be worried about search times? If not, it will keep growing, so what is cons

Answer 1

large is not a useful concept in db design.

Performance is determined by many things, but the label large is not one of them. Instead, concern yourself with:

• hardware
• OS and db configuration
• schema design
• indexing
• query optimization
• most importantly, testing for yourself on equivalent hardware with equivalent volume of data and under concurrent usage

Only then you will have an answer that is relevant to you. Beyond this, application design is also a huge factor. N+1 queries and caching can have huge effects on perceived (and real) performance.