One of the most essential components of any IT environment is the server.

As a business grows in scale and complexity, you must set up, monitor, and maintain a database server.

Great database design gets linked to the performance of an application.

When a database is badly designed, SQL queries will take longer and annihilate overall performance. A delay of even a few milliseconds, when multiplied, can bring your system to its knees.

To get the most from your SQL server, follow these five performance tuning tips below:

Optimize Indexes

Indexes help improve the speed of queries by providing faster access to data.

Ensure your tables have the correct indexes for the queries being run against them so that they can be used effectively. Minimize the use of subqueries because they are hard for anyone to read and understand.

For complex modeling and reporting, use common table expressions instead. CTEs separate code into a few smaller queries rather than one giant query.

Data Retrieval

When pulling security reports, developing models, or exploring datasets, it is essential that you only retrieve the data you need. Do not waste money or resources on data you do not require to perform that specific task.

Only select the necessary columns and limit the number of rows you return to avoid slowing down relational databases like MySQL.

Use the LIMIT function to reduce the number of rows returned – aim to limit that number to 100 or 200.

Stored Procedures

Stored procedures are database objects with lines of SQL code. These can be automated and reused to simplify logic, which reduces development time.

These work similarly to functions and can be saved and applied in your SQL Server 2022 environment.

They improve your cloud performance because they compile and cache the code in frequently used queries.

Partitioning and Sharding

These two techniques get used to spread data in the cloud.

With partitioning, large tables get divided into several smaller tables – each with a key.

Partition keys are usually based on the time the rows are created, so when queries get executed – the server automatically routes through to the information contained in those partitioned tables.

Sharding is similar to portioning, but instead of splitting big tables into smaller ones, it splits large databases into smaller ones.

Each of these databases is on a different server, and a partition key gets used to redirect queries to that specific database. Sharding improves processing times because the load gets split across servers that work simultaneously.

Monitoring

As with most things in the world of technology, monitoring is essential to keep things running optimally.

Monitor query performance to optimize your SQL queries and find out which ones are taking the longest. That will allow you to identify which queries need to be optimized and will allow you to pinpoint your overall performance issues and resolve them.

Places to start monitoring include database logs, the server, and any cloud-connected applications.

To End

Remember, as your number of users increases – so does the competition for your server’s resources. That might mean adding another server to your setup, or you could suffer an overall throughput delay.