Database performance

Performance issues are often the result of a poor database design and can be addressed only by changing the structure and design of the database. When you design a database, you must ensure that the database performs all the important functions correctly and quickly. the greatest benefit can be gained from the general areas of logical database design, index design, query design, and application design. Also, the biggest performance problems are often caused by deficiencies in these same areas. If you are concerned with performance, you should concentrate on these areas first. When you design and implement a database, you should identify the large tables in the database and the more complex processes that the database will perform, and give special consideration to performance when designing these tables.

Reasonable normalization of the logical database design yields best performance. A greater number of narrow tables is characteristic of a normalized database. A lesser number of wide tables is characteristic of a denormalized database. A highly normalized database is routinely associated with complex relational joins, which can hurt performance.

There are also some hardware considerations. Generally, the larger the database, the greater the hardware requirements. The number of concurrent users/sessions, transaction throughput, and the types of operations within the database can impact the performance. Disk storage requirements, more memory and faster processors would be needed for the data warehouse to enable more of the data to be cached in memory and queries referencing large amounts of data to be processed quickly.

Related Topics:

About designing a database

Normalization

Creating a new database

Create a table

How to create a database

About Create Database Wizard