Download the presentation: 100-times-faster-experiences-making-sql-server-fly-sql-saturday-prov-2015-12-12

How do you go about making a program run a lot faster!  Like 100 times faster?   It’s difficult.  Microsoft tried in the Hekaton project, its in-memory tables feature of SQL 2014, and they got close.  Inspired by that effort, this presentation looks at some recent cases where I’ve been able to achieve huge performance improvements in SQL Server code and how that happens.

When I give my “Writing faster T-SQL Stored Procedure and Functions” presentation, I emphasize that the first thing to think about is, “How can I accomplish this task some other way that will be much faster”.   Sometimes there’s a better algorithm.  Sometimes a different technology is more appropriate.  Sometimes, as with Hekaton, it’s a combination of many changes that combine to create the desired outcome much, much faster.

This presentation is illustrated with examples where each of the above strategies is used. Some of the topics are:

  • Query strategies, such as achieving parallelism, can make a big difference.
  • When SQLCLR might be just the right tool and T-SQL the wrong one.
  • Indexes make code faster, right? Or not!
  • T-SQL Functions, when is this too much of a good thing?
  • Pulling out all the stops to make ETL fly.