my SELECT statement is very slow - sql

My table contain 97 column with data type varchar(200) about 80% and bigint,char.
select count(*) from mytable it return
4500 rows
I am testing with 100 rows with SQL statement
select * from mytable .It use time about 2.3 min
I think,it is too very slow if return all record
please recommend me for the way to up speed my query and result.
my db server is db2 9.5

The first thing you should do to improve the performance is stop using SELECT *. Rewrite the query to get the columns you need.
the second thing to do is to add a WHERE clause. Do you really need to return all rows for the table?
Third thing is indexes, does you table have any, can you use indexed columns in your WHERE statement, etc.
What is the reason not to use select *?
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2007/07/18/the-real-reason-select-queries-are-bad-index-coverage.aspx

You need to isolate what is slow, the query or displaying the query. I am assuming it is a combination of both.
When you have 97 columns each being a varchar(200) sql cannot store all the info on the same row in a page . The worst case scenario is 97 * 202 (i used 202 instead of 200 because sql needs to store the length of a varchar in each column and i believe it stores it as two bytes) 19594 which is much larger than the row on a page can handle. TL;DR; normalize your table and have the columns broken up into logical units on another table.
Also doing a SELECT * FROM X will result in a full table scan which is much slower then querying on an indexed column.
If you must do a SELECT * FROM X and you have to have 97 columns please change the column data types to be a smaller data type (int,tinyint,char(10)) this will optimize the storage and should speed up the query.

Related

How to improve performance of select queries from table with lots of columns

I have a table with almost 100 columns. The type for most of the columns is Nvarchar(50).
When I select rows by query, it takes a long time, depending on the number of rows. Now, the table includes 250,000 rows. It takes a a full minute to get all the rows when I execute:
SELECT * FROM Table1
I tried to add indexes, but it didn't shorten the time.
How can I build this table in a better way, so that the query's execute time will be shorter?
I'm using SQL Server 2014.
Try to reduce the size of the table by adjusting the data types to the minimum requirements. Don't use a bigint where an int will suffice, or Unicode types if you are not holding Unicode text and keep data lengths to the minimum requirement. If there are nvarchar(50) columns with a great deal of Nulls, set Sparse to True in the column properties to reduce the amount of data that has to be loaded.
You can use an index with includes. If you make sure that the include contains only the columns you select, SQL server can run the query exclusively on the index, which improves performance.
For example a table...
CREATE TABLE Example (
Column1 INT,
Column2 INT,
--....
Column100 INT
)
...with a query on a subset of the columns:
SELECT Column1, Column2, Column3
WHERE Column1 > 1000
You can create the index
CREATE INDEX IX_Example
ON Example(Column1)
INCLUDE (Column2, Column3)
Since SQL Server can get all the information it needs from the index, it won't touch the table. However, you will need more space for index than without includes, because the data from the table is now stored redundandly in the index.
Your Execution plan will give you answer, check it
If you're using 'SELECT * FROM Table1' then Indexes won't make any difference. SQL will need to read the entire table from Disk to Buffer. If you can't get away from Selecting all columns then look at what record-sets are most often returned, i.e. Transactions from 2016. If this is the case, then you can introduce Partitioning (Enterprise), or if you are on SQL Standard create a 'Filtered Covering Index' (including all columns) that only contains records from 2016. If you can afford the extra update overhead then SQL will use the smaller index to fulfill the bulk of user demand.

Why SQL query can take so long time to return results?

I have an SQL query as simple as:
select * from recent_cases where user_id=1000000 and case_id=10095;
It takes up to 0.4 seconds to execute it in Oracle. And when I do 20 requests in a row, it takes > 10s.
The table 'recent_cases' has 4 columns: ID, USER_ID, CASE_ID and VISITED_DATE. Currently there are only 38 records in this table.
Also, there are 3 indexes on this table: on ID column, on USER_ID column, and on (USER_ID, CASE_ID) columns pair.
Any ideas?
One theory -- the table has a very large data segment and high water mark near the end, but the statistics are not prompting the optimiser to use an index. Therefore you're getting a slow full table scan. You could ALTER TABLE ... MOVE and rebuild the indexes to fix such a problem, or COALESCE it.
Oracle Databases have a function called "analyze table". This function can speed up select statements a lot, even if there are just a few rows in the table.
Here are some links which might help you:
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_oracle_analyze_table.htm
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28310/general002.htm

Selecting 'highest' X rows without sorting

I've got a table with huge amount of data. Lets say 10GB of lines, containing bunch of crap. I need to select for example X rows (X is usually below 10) with highest amount column.
Is there any way how to do it without sorting the whole table? Sorting this amount of data is extremely time-expensive, I'd be OK with one scan through the whole table and selecting X highest values, and letting the rest untouched. I'm using SQL Server.
Create an index on amount then SQL Server can select the top 10 from that and do bookmark lookups to retrieve the missing columns.
SELECT TOP 10 Amount FROM myTable ORDER BY Amount DESC
if it is indexed, the query optimizer should use the index.
If not, I do no see how one could avoid scanning the whole thing...
Wether an index is usefull or not depends on how often you do that search.
You could also consider putting that query into an indexed view. I think this will give you the best benefit/cost ration.

Selecting data effectively sql

I have a very large table with over 1000 records and 200 columns. When I try to retreive records matching some criteria in the WHERE clause using SELECT statement it takes a lot of time. But most of the time I just want to select a single record that matches the criteria in the WHERE clause rather than all the records.
I guess there should be a way to select just a single record and exit which would minimize the retrieval time. I tried ROWNUM=1 in the WHERE clause but it didn't really work because I guess the engine still checks all the records even after finding the first record matching the WHERE criteria. Is there a way to optimize in case if I want to select just a few records?
Thanks in advance.
Edit:
I am using oracle 10g.
The Query looks like,
Select *
from Really_Big_table
where column1 is NOT NULL
and column2 is NOT NULL
and rownum=1;
This seems to work slower than the version without rownum=1;
rownum is what you want, but you need to perform your main query as a subquery.
For example, if your original query is:
SELECT co1, col2
FROM table
WHERE condition
then you should try
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT col1, col2
FROM table
WHERE condition
) WHERE rownum <= 1
See http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/o56asktom.html for details on how rownum works in Oracle.
1,000 records isn't a lot of data in a table. 200 columns is a reasonably wide table. For this reason, I'd suggest you aren't dealing with a really big table - I've performed queries against millions of rows with no problems.
Here is a little experiment... how long does it take to run this compared to the "SELECT *" query?
SELECT
Really_Big_table.Id
FROM
Really_Big_table
WHERE
column1 IS NOT NULL
AND
column2 IS NOT NULL
AND
rownum=1;
An example is here: You can view more here
SELECT ename, sal
FROM ( SELECT ename, sal, RANK() OVER (ORDER BY sal DESC) sal_rank
FROM emp )
WHERE sal_rank <= 1;
You also have to do some column indexing for column in the WHERE clause
In SQL most of the optimization would come in the form on index on the table (where you would index the columns that appear in the WHERE and ORDER BY columns as a rough guide).
You did not specify what SQL database you are using, so I can't point to a good resource.
Here is an introduction to indexes on Oracle.
Here another tutorial.
As for queries - you should always specify the columns you are returning and not use a blanket *.
it shouldn't take a lot of time to query a 1000 rows table. There are exceptions however, check if you are in one of the following cases:
1. Lots of rows were deleted
The table had a massive amount of rows in the past. Since the High Water Mark (HWM) is still high (delete won't lower it) and FULL TABLE SCAN read all the data up to the high water mark, it may take a lot of time to return results even if the table is now nearly empty.
Analyse your table (dbms_stats.gather_table_stats('<owner>','<table>')) and compare the space actually used by the rows (space on disk) with the effective space (data), for example:
SELECT t.avg_row_len * t.num_rows data_bytes,
(t.blocks - t.empty_blocks) * ts.block_size bytes_used
FROM user_tables t
JOIN user_tablespaces ts ON t.tablespace_name = ts.tablespace_name
WHERE t.table_name = '<your_table>';
You will have to take into account the overhead of the rows and blocks as well as the space reserved for update (PCT_FREE). If you see that you use a lot more space than required (typical overhead is below 30%, YMMV) you may want to reset the HWM, either:
ALTER TABLE <your_table> MOVE; and then rebuild INDEX (ALTER INDEX <index> REBUILD), don't forget to collect stats afterwards.
use DBMS_REDEFINITION
2. The table has very large columns
Check if you have columns of datatype LOB, CLOB, LONG (irk), etc. Data over 4000 bytes in any of these columns is stored out of line (in a separate segment), which means that if you don't select these columns you will only query the other smaller columns.
If you are in this case, don't use SELECT *. Either you don't need the data in the large columns or use SELECT rowid and then do a second query : SELECT * WHERE rowid = <rowid>.

Is there efficient SQL to query a portion of a large table

The typical way of selecting data is:
select * from my_table
But what if the table contains 10 million records and you only want records 300,010 to 300,020
Is there a way to create a SQL statement on Microsoft SQL that only gets 10 records at once?
E.g.
select * from my_table from records 300,010 to 300,020
This would be way more efficient than retrieving 10 million records across the network, storing them in the IIS server and then counting to the records you want.
SELECT * FROM my_table is just the tip of the iceberg. Assuming you're talking a table with an identity field for the primary key, you can just say:
SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE ID >= 300010 AND ID <= 300020
You should also know that selecting * is considered poor practice in many circles. They want you specify the exact column list.
Try looking at info about pagination. Here's a short summary of it for SQL Server.
Absolutely. On MySQL and PostgreSQL (the two databases I've used), the syntax would be
SELECT [columns] FROM table LIMIT 10 OFFSET 300010;
On MS SQL, it's something like SELECT TOP 10 ...; I don't know the syntax for offsetting the record list.
Note that you never want to use SELECT *; it's a maintenance nightmare if anything ever changes. This query, though, is going to be incredibly slow since your database will have to scan through and throw away the first 300,010 records to get to the 10 you want. It'll also be unpredictable, since you haven't told the database which order you want the records in.
This is the core of SQL: tell it which 10 records you want, identified by a key in a specific range, and the database will do its best to grab and return those records with minimal work. Look up any tutorial on SQL for more information on how it works.
When working with large tables, it is often a good idea to make use of Partitioning techniques available in SQL Server.
The rules of your partitition function typically dictate that only a range of data can reside within a given partition. You could split your partitions by date range or ID for example.
In order to select from a particular partition you would use a query similar to the following.
SELECT <Column Name1>…/*
FROM <Table Name>
WHERE $PARTITION.<Partition Function Name>(<Column Name>) = <Partition Number>
Take a look at the following white paper for more detailed infromation on partitioning in SQL Server 2005.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345146.aspx
I hope this helps however please feel free to pose further questions.
Cheers, John
I use wrapper queries to select the core query and then just isolate the ROW numbers that i wish to take from the query - this allows the SQL server to do all the heavy lifting inside the CORE query and just pass out the small amount of the table that i have requested. All you need to do is pass the [start_row_variable] and the [end_row_variable] into the SQL query.
NOTE: The order clause is specified OUTSIDE the core query [sql_order_clause]
w1 and w2 are TEMPORARY table created by the SQL server as the wrapper tables.
SELECT
w1.*
FROM(
SELECT w2.*,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER ([sql_order_clause]) AS ROW
FROM (
<!--- CORE QUERY START --->
SELECT [columns]
FROM [table_name]
WHERE [sql_string]
<!--- CORE QUERY END --->
) AS w2
) AS w1
WHERE ROW BETWEEN [start_row_variable] AND [end_row_variable]
This method has hugely optimized my database systems. It works very well.
IMPORTANT: Be sure to always explicitly specify only the exact columns you wish to retrieve in the core query as fetching unnecessary data in these CORE queries can cost you serious overhead
Use TOP to select only a limited amont of rows like:
SELECT TOP 10 * FROM my_table WHERE ID >= 300010
Add an ORDER BY if you want the results in a particular order.
To be efficient there has to be an index on the ID column.