Not much of a post tonight.  I didn’t realize it had been over two months since I last posted.  I’m sure all my faithful readers (all 1 or 2 of them?) have been holding their breath.

Anyway, tonight went to the local SQL Server Users Group meeting.  They had a remote demonstration on query tuning, one of my favorite topics.

In fact performance tuning in general has been a topic I’ve often enjoyed.

First rule: There is always a performance bottleneck.  This is one of the first rules I recall reading.  At first people object, “but the system is fast enough.”  That may be true.  BUT, there is still limiting it from being better.  Of course you might not be able to fix that limit.  But more importantly, it may not matter.

Second rule: It may not matter.  If your query is already running in subsecond times, it may not be worth spending any time on optimizing it any further.  Or, if your query takes 1 hour to run, but runs at night when nothing else is running, it may not matter.

Third rule: Optimize only what you need to.  A classic example of this I’ve seen is finding reports that run overnight and slow down other processes.  You start to optimize it and then think to ask, “is anyone still using this report?”  You find out the report is no longer being used.  Now you can achieve the holy grail (and perhaps the only exception to rule 1): infinite optimization.  Delete the report and suddenly you have infinitely optimized it.

BTW, these rules don’t apply just to SQL Server.

Optimize your life and enjoy more of your time doing things you enjoy.