If you ever studied normalisation of databases, you have probably come to the same conclusion as I have regarding NULL: It is best if NULL values in the database can be avoided but it is not always easy to achieve a NULL-free database. Let’s look at an example:
Continue reading “What is NULL?”DELETE and Non Clustered Indexes
I’ll start off with a disclaimer: I’m going to tell you about something that happened in a specific system Environment. There’s no such thing as a general advice you can build on this specific scenario. I’m just posting it because I was myself surprised by what order of magnitude I was able to speed up a specific query by slightly removing some of the work in the execution plan.
The other day I helped troubleshooting a database system. In a table with some 400 million records, a subset (50-60 million records) were to be deleted. The application kept timing out on this delete operation so I adviced the developer to split the delete operation into smaller chunks. I even helped writing a T-SQL script to perform the delete in one million row chunks. The script was pretty basic – a WHILE-loop which checked if any rows fulfilling the WHERE-condition of the delete was left in the table, and inside the loop a DELETE TOP(one million) followed by an explicit checkpoint.
Continue reading “DELETE and Non Clustered Indexes”