In this blog post we are going to leave about how to Speed Up Performance Without Code Change or Configuration Change in SQL Server. This blog post is going to be a fun and quick read.
Please make sure that you read this blog post till the end to learn the secret how I improved query performance from 40 seconds to just 12 seconds.
Behind the Scene
If you are a living independent consultant’s life you know that month of December is an amazing month for you. Most of the organization’s have year ending in December and they usually have some budget left from their yearly spending. Most of the organizations save their budget till the last month as they want to make sure that if something urgent comes up they have enough money to cover it. Well, this is blessings for independent consultants, when organizations have not figured out where to spend money till the end of the month.
When organizations have budget left over, they usually look for the opportunity to spend it constructively. In the most cases, if they do not spend money they lose that portion of the budget and the next year they get lesser budget. It is very common practice.
Opportunity for Consultants
Now no one wants slow performance for their business application. Everyone wants amazing performance of their front-end application and back-end database. This is when the organizations usually look outside for consultants who can help them speed up their application’s performance. Every year in the month of December I get lots of requests for helping them to tune their system’s performance. My most popular service is Index Tuning and Strategy Guidance (99 minutes). In this I help organizations to tune their system with the help of Indexing. It is very powerful and it gives an instant performance improvement. Once the tuning is over, organizations have to test their system to make sure it is giving optimal performance. This service requires that DBA with whom I work have administrator rights to the database.
However, in the month of December, the most popular request is not about Index Tuning but rather a very strange request. I believe this is because the December month is a financial year ending as well as month of festivals. Not everyone has time to test their system as well do various code changes in the month of December.
Here is the most popular request I often hear in the month of December.
“Help us to Speed Up our application’s performance without changing any code or configuration in SQL Server.”
Now think about it for a moment. The request is indeed very strange. They want to improve the performance of their system without allowing me to touch any settings or code in SQL Server. Well, though it sounds strange, it is not as strange as you think.
Network Bandwidth Optimizations
I know the request is very strange, but there has to be a solution for every problem. Fortunately, this is when my formal education as Master of Science in Computer Network (from University of Southern California, USC, Los Angeles, California) helps me. Not many people know that when send data packets on a network, we are not fully optimizing the network packets as well as lots of bandwidth goes to waste. When I am not allowed to touch code or computer system, I always look at the network optimization.
I did intensive research to find a good Network Bandwith Optimization product on the internet and finally landed upon NitroAccelerator. I did quite a lot of performance tests with this product and I figured out it indeed helps improving SQL Server Performance without Code Change.
Speed Up Performance Without Code Change
Here is a quick video where you can see how we can improve performance with the help of NitroAccelerator and improve performance of our query. Please note that I am on my fastest possible gigabit network and my network traffic is absolutely near to nothing. Even though in this case, I have got amazing performance gain.
My query which was earlier running for 40 seconds is now running for 12 seconds.
Think about it, in my fastest possible network, I have gained over 300% times query performance gain. How much performance can you gain in your environment where the network is heavily congested?
Update 1: Many asked details about the software I used in the video. You can download NitroAccelerator for free.
Update 2: If you try this software out and it does not speed up your system without code change, there can be two reasons 1) Incorrect Settings of software 2) Query Not Qualifying for Performance. In either case you can reach out to me for further help. Contact me at pinal @ sqlauthority.com
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)
First appeared on SQL SERVER – Speed Up Performance Without Code Change