Favourite performance tuning tricks [closed]

Answer 1

Running the query using WITH (NoLock) is pretty much standard operation in my place. Anyone caught running queries on the tens-of-gigabytes tables without it is taken out and shot.

Answer 2

SET NOCOUNT ON

Usually the first line inside my stored procedures, unless I actually need to use @@ROWCOUNT.

Answer 3

I always go to SQL Profiler (if it's a stored procedure with a lot of nesting levels) or the query execution planner (if it's a few SQL statements with no nesting) first. 90% of the time you can find the problem immediately with one of these two tools.

Answer 4

Not necessarily a SQL performance trick per se but definately related:

A good idea would be to use memcached where possible as it would be much faster just fetching the precompiled data directly from memory rather than getting it from the database. There's also a flavour of MySQL that got memcached built in (third party).

Answer 5

Remove cursors wherever the are not neceesary.

Answer 6

Don't prefix Stored Procedure names with "sp_" because system procedures all start with "sp_", and SQL Server will have to search harder to find your procedure when it gets called.