Beyond database tuning
Let me share with you something that happened to me today.
I saw this very heavy SQL, running several times a day, taking up to 2 hours each time, consuming lot of database resources (CPU & IO).
This select was doing a count on a very big table (150M rows) joined with a smaller table (5M rows) and had some non selective filter predicates in its where clause.
Tuning capability didn’t look so promising for this SQL.
I have decided to go and ask the application for the purpose of this SQL, and investigate what it does with its result (count).
What I found was quite a shock. They code was basically doing that: (more…)