Six Best Practices to Improve SQL Query Performance

7 out of 10 Condusiv customers come to us because they are experiencing SQL performance issues and user complaints.

MS SQL Server is the world’s leading RDMS and has plentiful benefits and features that empower its efficient operation. As with any such robust platform, however—especially one which has matured as SQL Server has—there have been best practices evolved that allow for its best performance.

For any company utilizing it, Microsoft SQL Server is central to a company’s management and storage of information. In business, time is money, so any company that relies on information to function (and in this digital age that would be pretty much all of them) needs access to that information as rapidly as possible. In that information is often obtained from databases through queries, optimizing SQL query performance is vital.

As 7 out of 10 Condusiv customers come to us because they were experiencing SQL performance issues and user complaints, we have amassed a great deal of experience on this topic and would like to share. We have done extensive work in eliminating I/O inefficiencies and streamlining I/O for optimum performance. It is especially important in SQL to reduce the number of random and “noisy” I/Os as they can be quite problematic. We will cover this as well as some additional best practices. Some of these practices may be more time-consuming, and may even require a SQL consultant, and some are easy to solve.