I have two SQL Server Azure instances with Standard S2: 50 DTUs. When I run simple select statements on two instances, one of them takes more time than other or times out. Slower one have more records in tables in slower instance.
Both the instances have same table schema. Number of records in tables present in slower instances, LogEvidence table have 1324928 and LogItem table have 649391. Number of records in tables present in faster instances, LogEvidence table have 89504 and LogItem table have 89496.
Below is the simple select statement
select count(*) from logitem
Above simple select statement takes 0s on faster instance and on slower instance it takes 138s. And if I execute any stored procedure, slower instance takes more times or times out.
Time taken by both instances should be almost same.
Those simple queries perform big scans on the table and involve reading all rows. If the table has a clustered index you don't have to perform a SELECT COUNT(*) to know the number of records the table has. The following query should to that faster:
SELECT OBJECT_NAME(ps.object_id) , i.name , row_count
FROM sys.dm_db_partition_stats AS ps INNER JOIN sys.indexes AS i
ON ps.index_id = i.index_id AND ps.object_id = i.object_id
WHERE i.name like '%logitem%'
If the table does not have an Id please add an autoid on the table and make it the clustered index.
You can also try to add a useless WHERE clause like below to the query, and you may get a better performance.
SELECT count(*)
FROM logitem
WHERE id > 0
Where Id is the autoid column.
I had some experience with azure, and from your description I think there is one of following things you can do:
Since you are using only count, then indexes play no role. Though I understand other answer says to use where id>0, but azure should count 1M rows without 30 second timeout. But for other queries you need Indexes, or Azure will fail.
Check if your server is not under maintenance, it is low chance but it does happen with us, we are on s4 and occasionally our server just get slow, but after 10-30 minute it works fine. Maybe the actual hardware get in some process that slows it down.
This is most important reason for slow execution, especially if you have lot of write and delete happen on your server. Check the database size. Azure database got fragmented too quickly, we have to optimize it's data fragmentation every 10 days, if your bacpac size is 100MB and your database size in Azure shows like 5-6 GB, then it definitely need optimization as lot of fragments were generated. MSDN has given some queries to recreate indexes and remove fragmentation, I don't remember them URL, but simple google search will bring that. It should speed things up.
Azure has feature that auto generate indexes, check if both table share same indexes, maybe your faster version has some index Azure create by itself.
You should step back and ponder your assumption:
1. "performance should be about the same" - you have more data in one case vs. the other. In the limit, you should expect the performance of the second one to potentially be somewhat slower than the original one.
Now, let's go into the "why" it can be slower and how you can investigate each case:
Step 1: Look at the query plans for each case and see what you have. Likely, you will have something like:
StreamAgg <- Clustered Index Scan
(if you have other b-tree indexes, you might scan one of them and it might be faster since the index would not be as wide and thus the index will have fewer pages to scan)
Step 2: You can look at the actual execution times and resource use for each query to see why they are different. One way to do this is to run "set statistics time on", then "set statistics io on", then run your query. it will dump out extra information into SSMS when you run the query from there. (You can read about this here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/set-statistics-io-transact-sql?view=sql-server-2017)
If you review the output from each one, you may find reasons for why the performance is different. One possible explanation is that the amount of memory is limited in an S2 and you are just at the boundary for where all the pages fit in memory vs. not for the two examples. In that case, doing a count(*) query would need to cycle through all the pages and do much more IO than in the smaller case where they might all be in memory already.
Step 3: You can also potentially examine the query store to get insight into why one case is fast and one case is not. An overview of how to use it is here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/performance/monitoring-performance-by-using-the-query-store?view=sql-server-2017
Note: it is on-by-default in SQL Azure so you can just go look at the time window when you ran the queries to get insight into what was happening at that time in your database.
Finally, you might consider ways to make the query go faster if you need it to be faster.
* creating a narrow b-tree index on the table may help for that one query (count(*) doesn't return any columns and just needs a count of rows from some non-filtered index).
* you could use a Columnstore (which requires an S3 or above for memory reasons). This kind of column-oriented index is optimized for this kind of query and would be much faster as the size of the table increases in the future.
Hope that help
I am trying to do a left join between two tables in a postgreSQL database and finding it takes about 14 minutes to run. From existing SO posts, it seems like this type of join should be on the order of seconds, so I'd like to know how to improve the performance of this join. I'm running 64-bit postgreSQL version 9.4.4 on a Windows 8 machine w/ 8 GB RAM, using pgAdmin III. The table structures are as follows:
Table A: "parcels_qtr":
parcel (text) | yr (int) | qtr (text) | lpid (pk, text) |
Has 15.5 million rows, each column is indexed, and "lpid" is the primary key. I also ran this table through a standard vacuum process.
Table B: "postalvac_qtr":
parcel (text) | yr (int) | qtr (text) | lpid (pk, text) | vacCountY (int) |
Has 618,000 records, all fields except "vacCountY" are indexed and "lpid" is the primary key. This also has gone through a standard vacuum process.
When running with data output, it takes about 14 min. When running with explain (analyze, buffers) it takes a little over a minute. First question - is this difference in performance wholly attributable to printing the data or is something else going on here?
And second question, can I get this run time down to a few seconds?
Here is my SQL code:
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS)
select a.parcel,
a.lpid,
a.yr,
a.qtr,
b."vacCountY"
from parcels_qtr as a
left join postalvac_qtr as b
on a.lpid = b.lpid;
And here are the results of my explain statement: https://explain.depesz.com/s/uKkK
I'm pretty new to postgreSQL so patience and explanations would be greatly appreciated!
You're asking the DB to do quite a bit of work. Just looking at the explain plan, it's:
Read in an entire table (postalvac_qtr)
Build a hash based on lpid
Read in an entire other, much larger, table (parcels_qtr)
Hash each of the 15MM lpids, and match them to the existing hash table
How large are these tables? You can check this by issuing:
SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_relation_size('parcels_qtr'));
I'm almost certain that this hash join is spilling out to disk, and the way it's structured ("give me all of the data from both of these tables"), there's no way it won't.
The indices don't help, and can't. As long as you're asking for the entirety of a table, using an index would only make things slower -- postgres has to traverse the entire table anyway, so it might as well issue a sequential scan.
As for why the query has different performance than the explain analyze, I suspect you're correct. A combination of 1- sending 15M rows to your client, and 2- trying to display it, is going to cause a significant slowdown above and beyond the actual query.
So, what can you do about it?
First, what is this query trying to do? How often do you want to grab all of the data in those two tables, completely unfiltered? If it's very common, you may want to consider going back to the requirements stage and figuring out another way to address that need (e.g. would it be reasonable to grab all the data for a given year and quarter instead?). If it's uncommon (say, a daily export), then 1-14min might be fine.
Second, you should make sure that your tables aren't bloated. If you experience significant update or delete traffic on your tables, that can grow them over time. The autovacuum daemon is there to help deal with this, but occasionally issuing a vacuum full will also help.
Third, you can try tuning your DB config. In postgresql.conf, there are parameters for things like the expected amount of RAM that your server can use for disk cache, and the amount of RAM the server can use for sorting or joining (before it spills out to disk). By tinkering with these sorts of parameters, you might be able to improve the speed.
Fourth, you might want to revisit your schema. Do you want year and quarter as two separate columns, or would you be better off with a single column of the date type? Do you want a text key, or would you be better off with a bigint (either serial or derived from the text column), which will likely join more quickly? Are the parcel, yr, and qtr fields actually needed in both tables, or are they duplicate data in one table?
Anyway, I hope this helps.
Tracking indexes and analyzing the tables on which index add, we encounter some situations:
some of our tables have index, but when I execute a query with a clause where on index field, doesn't account in your idx_scan field respective. Same relname and schemaname, so, I couldn't be wrong.
Testing more, I deleted and create the table again, after that the query returned to account the idx_scan.
That occurred with another tables too, we executed some queries with indexes and didn't account idx_scan field, only in seq_scan and even if I create another field in the same table with index, this new field doesn't count idx_scan.
Whats the problem with these tables? What do we do wrong? Only if I create a new table with indexes that account in idx_scan, just in an old table that has wrong.
We did migration sometimes with this database, maybe it can be the problem? Happened on localhost and server online.
Another event that we saw, some indexes were accounted, idx_scan > 0, and when execute query select, does not increase idx_scan again, the number was fixed and just increase seq_scan.
I believe those problems can be related.
I appreciate some help, it's a big mystery prowling our DB and have no idea what the problem can be.
A couple suggestions (and what to add to your question).
The first is that index scans are not always favored to to sequential scans. For example, if your table is small or the planner estimates that most pages will need to be fetched, an index scan will be omitted in favor of a sequential scan.
Remember: no plan beats retrieving a single page off disk and sequentially running through it.
Similarly if you have to retrieve, say, 50% of the pages of a relation, doing an index scan is going to trade somewhat less disk/IO total for a great deal more random disk/IO. It might be a win if you use SSD's but certainly not with conventional hard drives. After all you don't really want to be waiting for platters to turn. If you are using SSD's you can tweak planner settings accordingly.
So index vs sequential scan is not the end of the story. The question is how many rows are retrieved, how big the tables are, what percentage of disk pages are retrieved, etc.
If it really is picking a bad plan (rather than a good plan that you didn't consider!) then the question becomes why. There are ways of setting statistics targets but these may not be really helpful.
Finally the planner really can't choose an index in some cases where you might like it to. For example, suppose I have a 10 million row table with records spanning 5 years (approx 2 million rows per year on average). I would like to get the distinct years. I can't do this with a standard query and index, but I can build a WITH RECURSIVE CTE to essentially execute the same query once for each year and that will use an index. Of course you had better have an index in that case or WITH RECURSIVE will do a sequential scan for each year which is certainly not what you want!
tl;dr: It's complicated. You want to make sure this is really a bad plan before jumping to conclusions and then if it is a bad plan see what you can do about it depending on your configuration.
Using SQLite, Got a table with ~10 columns. Theres ~25million rows.
That table has an INDEX on 'sid, uid, area, type'.
I run a select like so:
SELECT sid from actions where uid=1234 and area=1 and type=2
That returns me 1571 results, and takes 4 minutes to complete.
Is that sane?
I'm far from an SQL expert, so hopefully someone can fill me in on what I'm missing. Why could this possibly take 4+ minutes with everything indexed?
Any recommended resources to learn about achieving high SQL performance? I feel like a lot of the Google results just give me opinions or anecdotes, I wouldn't mind a solid book.
Create uid+area+type index instead, or uid+area+type+sid
Since the index starts with the sid column, it must do a scan (start at the beginning, read to the end) of either the index or the table to find your data matching the other 3 columns. This means it has to read all 25 million rows to find the answer. Even if it's reading just the rows of the index rather than the table, that's a lot of work.
Imagine a phone book of the greater New York metropolitan area, organized by (with an 'index' on) Last Name, First Name.
You submit SELECT [Last Name] FROM NewYorkPhoneBook WHERE [First Name] = 'Thelma'
It has to read all 25 million entries to find all those Thelmas. Unless you either specify the last name and can then turn directly to the page where that last name first appers (a seek), or have an index organized by First Name (a seek on the index followed by a seek on the table, aka a "bookmark lookup"), there's no way around it.
The index you would create to make your query faster is on uid, area, type. You could include sid, though leave it out if sid is part of the primary key.
Note: Tables often do have multiple indexes. Just note that the more indexes, the slower the write performance. Unnecessary indexes can slow overall performance, sometimes radically so. Testing and eventually experience will help guide you in this. Also, reasoning it out as a real-world problem (like my phone book examples) can really help. If it wouldn't make sense with phone books (and separate phone book indexes) then it probably won't make sense in the database.
One more thing: even if you put an index on those columns, if your query is going to end up pulling a great percentage of the rows in the main table, it will still be cheaper to scan the table rather than do the bookmark lookup (seek the index then seek the table for each row found). The exact "tipping point" of whether to do a bookmark lookup with a seek, or to do a table scan isn't something I can tell you off the top of my head, but it is based on solid math.
The index is not really usefull as it does start with the wrong field... which means a table scan.
Looks like you have a normal computer there, not something made for databases. I run table scans over 650 million rows in about a minute on my lower end db server, but that means reading about a gigabyte per second from the discs, which are a RAID of 10k RM discs - RAID 10. Just to say that basically... that databases love IO, and that in a degree that you have never seen before. Basically larger db servers have many discs to satisfy the IOPS (IO per second) requirement. I have seen a server with 190 discs.
So, you ahve two choices: beed up your IOPS capability (means spending money), or set up indices that get used because they are "proper".
Proper means: an index only is usefull if the fields it contains are used from left to right. Not necessarily in the same order... but if a field is missed there is a chance the SQL System decides it is not worth pursuing the index and instead goes table scan (as in your case).
When you create your new index on uid, area and type, you should also do a select distinct on each one to determine which has the fewest distinct entries, then create your index such that the fewer the differences the earlier they show up in the index definition.
I recently asked this question:
MS SQL share identity seed amongst tables
(Many people wondered why)
I have the following layout of a table:
Table: Stars
starId bigint
categoryId bigint
starname varchar(200)
But my problem is that I have millions and millions of rows. So when I want to delete stars from the table Stars it is too intense on SQL Server.
I cannot use built in partitioning for 2005+ because I do not have an enterprise license.
When I do delete though, I always delete a whole category Id at a time.
I thought of doing a design like this:
Table: Star_1
starId bigint
CategoryId bigint constaint rock=1
starname varchar(200)
Table: Star_2
starId bigint
CategoryId bigint constaint rock=2
starname varchar(200)
In this way I can delete a whole category and hence millions of rows in O(1) by doing a simple drop table.
My question is, is it a problem to have hundreds of thousands of tables in your SQL Server? The drop in O(1) is extremely desirable to me. Maybe there's a completely different solution I'm not thinking of?
Edit:
Is a star ever modified once it is inserted? No.
Do you ever have to query across star categories? I never have to query across star categories.
If you are looking for data on a particular star, would you know which table to query? Yes
When entering data, how will the application decide which table to put the data into? The insertion of star data is done all at once at the start when the categoryId is created.
How many categories will there be? You can assume there will be infinite star categories. Let's say up to 100 star categories per day and up to 30 star categories not needed per day.
Truly do you need to delete the whole category or only the star that the data changed for? Yes the whole star category.
Have you tried deleting in batches? Yes we do that today, but it is not good enough.
od enough.
Another technique is mark the record for deletion? There is no need to mark a star as deleted because we know the whole star category is eligible to be deleted.
What proportion of them never get used? Typically we keep each star category data for a couple weeks but sometimes need to keep more.
When you decide one is useful is that good for ever or might it still need to be deleted later?
Not forever, but until a manual request to delete the category is issued.
If so what % of the time does that happen? Not that often.
What kind of disc arrangement are you using? Single filegroup storage and no partitioning currently.
Can you use sql enterprise ? No. There are many people that run this software and they only have sql standard. It is outside of their budget to get ms sql enterprise.
My question is, is it a problem to have hundreds of thousands of tables in your SQL Server?
Yes. It is a huge problem to have this many tables in your SQL Server. Every object has to be tracked by SQL Server as metadata, and once you include indexes, referential constraints, primary keys, defaults, and so on, then you are talking about millions of database objects.
While SQL Server may theoretically be able to handle 232 objects, rest assured that it will start buckling under the load much sooner than that.
And if the database doesn't collapse, your developers and IT staff almost certainly will. I get nervous when I see more than a thousand tables or so; show me a database with hundreds of thousands and I will run away screaming.
Creating hundreds of thousands of tables as a poor-man's partitioning strategy will eliminate your ability to do any of the following:
Write efficient queries (how do you SELECT multiple categories?)
Maintain unique identities (as you've already discovered)
Maintain referential integrity (unless you like managing 300,000 foreign keys)
Perform ranged updates
Write clean application code
Maintain any sort of history
Enforce proper security (it seems evident that users would have to be able to initiate these create/drops - very dangerous)
Cache properly - 100,000 tables means 100,000 different execution plans all competing for the same memory, which you likely don't have enough of;
Hire a DBA (because rest assured, they will quit as soon as they see your database).
On the other hand, it's not a problem at all to have hundreds of thousands of rows, or even millions of rows, in a single table - that's the way SQL Server and other SQL RDBMSes were designed to be used and they are very well-optimized for this case.
The drop in O(1) is extremely desirable to me. Maybe there's a completely different solution I'm not thinking of?
The typical solution to performance problems in databases is, in order of preference:
Run a profiler to determine what the slowest parts of the query are;
Improve the query, if possible (i.e. by eliminating non-sargable predicates);
Normalize or add indexes to eliminate those bottlenecks;
Denormalize when necessary (not generally applicable to deletes);
If cascade constraints or triggers are involved, disable those for the duration of the transaction and blow out the cascades manually.
But the reality here is that you don't need a "solution."
"Millions and millions of rows" is not a lot in a SQL Server database. It is very quick to delete a few thousand rows from a table of millions by simply indexing on the column you wish to delete from - in this case CategoryID. SQL Server can do this without breaking a sweat.
In fact, deletions normally have an O(M log N) complexity (N = number of rows, M = number of rows to delete). In order to achieve an O(1) deletion time, you'd be sacrificing almost every benefit that SQL Server provides in the first place.
O(M log N) may not be as fast as O(1), but the kind of slowdowns you're talking about (several minutes to delete) must have a secondary cause. The numbers do not add up, and to demonstrate this, I've gone ahead and produced a benchmark:
Table Schema:
CREATE TABLE Stars
(
StarID int NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1)
CONSTRAINT PK_Stars PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,
CategoryID smallint NOT NULL,
StarName varchar(200)
)
CREATE INDEX IX_Stars_Category
ON Stars (CategoryID)
Note that this schema is not even really optimized for DELETE operations, it's a fairly run-of-the-mill table schema you might see in SQL server. If this table has no relationships, then we don't need the surrogate key or clustered index (or we could put the clustered index on the category). I'll come back to that later.
Sample Data:
This will populate the table with 10 million rows, using 500 categories (i.e. a cardinality of 1:20,000 per category). You can tweak the parameters to change the amount of data and/or cardinality.
SET NOCOUNT ON
DECLARE
#BatchSize int,
#BatchNum int,
#BatchCount int,
#StatusMsg nvarchar(100)
SET #BatchSize = 1000
SET #BatchCount = 10000
SET #BatchNum = 1
WHILE (#BatchNum <= #BatchCount)
BEGIN
SET #StatusMsg =
N'Inserting rows - batch #' + CAST(#BatchNum AS nvarchar(5))
RAISERROR(#StatusMsg, 0, 1) WITH NOWAIT
INSERT Stars2 (CategoryID, StarName)
SELECT
v.number % 500,
CAST(RAND() * v.number AS varchar(200))
FROM master.dbo.spt_values v
WHERE v.type = 'P'
AND v.number >= 1
AND v.number <= #BatchSize
SET #BatchNum = #BatchNum + 1
END
Profile Script
The simplest of them all...
DELETE FROM Stars
WHERE CategoryID = 50
Results:
This was tested on an 5-year old workstation machine running, IIRC, a 32-bit dual-core AMD Athlon and a cheap 7200 RPM SATA drive.
I ran the test 10 times using different CategoryIDs. The slowest time (cold cache) was about 5 seconds. The fastest time was 1 second.
Perhaps not as fast as simply dropping the table, but nowhere near the multi-minute deletion times you mentioned. And remember, this isn't even on a decent machine!
But we can do better...
Everything about your question implies that this data isn't related. If you don't have relations, you don't need the surrogate key, and can get rid of one of the indexes, moving the clustered index to the CategoryID column.
Now, as a rule, clustered indexes on non-unique/non-sequential columns are not a good practice. But we're just benchmarking here, so we'll do it anyway:
CREATE TABLE Stars
(
CategoryID smallint NOT NULL,
StarName varchar(200)
)
CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX IX_Stars_Category
ON Stars (CategoryID)
Run the same test data generator on this (incurring a mind-boggling number of page splits) and the same deletion took an average of just 62 milliseconds, and 190 from a cold cache (outlier). And for reference, if the index is made nonclustered (no clustered index at all) then the delete time only goes up to an average of 606 ms.
Conclusion:
If you're seeing delete times of several minutes - or even several seconds then something is very, very wrong.
Possible factors are:
Statistics aren't up to date (shouldn't be an issue here, but if it is, just run sp_updatestats);
Lack of indexing (although, curiously, removing the IX_Stars_Category index in the first example actually leads to a faster overall delete, because the clustered index scan is faster than the nonclustered index delete);
Improperly-chosen data types. If you only have millions of rows, as opposed to billions, then you do not need a bigint on the StarID. You definitely don't need it on the CategoryID - if you have fewer than 32,768 categories then you can even do with a smallint. Every byte of unnecessary data in each row adds an I/O cost.
Lock contention. Maybe the problem isn't actually delete speed at all; maybe some other script or process is holding locks on Star rows and the DELETE just sits around waiting for them to let go.
Extremely poor hardware. I was able to run this without any problems on a pretty lousy machine, but if you're running this database on a '90s-era Presario or some similar machine that's preposterously unsuitable for hosting an instance of SQL Server, and it's heavily-loaded, then you're obviously going to run into problems.
Very expensive foreign keys, triggers, constraints, or other database objects which you haven't included in your example, which might be adding a high cost. Your execution plan should clearly show this (in the optimized example above, it's just a single Clustered Index Delete).
I honestly cannot think of any other possibilities. Deletes in SQL Server just aren't that slow.
If you're able to run these benchmarks and see roughly the same performance I saw (or better), then it means the problem is with your database design and optimization strategy, not with SQL Server or the asymptotic complexity of deletions. I would suggest, as a starting point, to read a little about optimization:
SQL Server Optimization Tips (Database Journal)
SQL Server Optimization (MSDN)
Improving SQL Server Performance (MSDN)
SQL Server Query Processing Team Blog
SQL Server Performance (particularly their tips on indexes)
If this still doesn't help you, then I can offer the following additional suggestions:
Upgrade to SQL Server 2008, which gives you a myriad of compression options that can vastly improve I/O performance;
Consider pre-compressing the per-category Star data into a compact serialized list (using the BinaryWriter class in .NET), and store it in a varbinary column. This way you can have one row per category. This violates 1NF rules, but since you don't seem to be doing anything with individual Star data from within the database anyway anyway, I doubt you'd be losing much.
Consider using a non-relational database or storage format, such as db4o or Cassandra. Instead of implementing a known database anti-pattern (the infamous "data dump"), use a tool that is actually designed for that kind of storage and access pattern.
Must you delete them? Often it is better to just set an IsDeleted bit column to 1, and then do the actual deletion asynchronously during off hours.
Edit:
This is a shot in the dark, but adding a clustered index on CategoryId may speed up deletes. It may also impact other queries adversely. Is this something you can test?
This was the old technique in SQL 2000 , partitioned views and remains a valid option for SQL 2005. The problem does come in from having large quantity of tables and the maintenance overheads associated with them.
As you say, partitioning is an enterprise feature, but is designed for this large scale data removal / rolling window effect.
One other option would be running batched deletes to avoid creating 1 very large transaction, creating hundreds of far smaller transactions, to avoid lock escalations and keep each transaction small.
Having separate tables is partitioning - you are just managing it manually and do not get any management assistance or unified access (without a view or partitioned view).
Is the cost of Enterprise Edition more expensive than the cost of separately building and maintaining a partitioning scheme?
Alternatives to the long-running delete also include populating a replacement table with identical schema and simply excluding the rows to be deleted and then swapping the table out with sp_rename.
I'm not understanding why whole categories of stars are being deleted on a regular basis? Presumably you are having new categories created all the time, which means your number of categories must be huge and partitioning on (manually or not) that would be very intensive.
Maybe on the Stars table set the PK to non-clustered and add a clustered index on categoryid.
Other than that, is the server setup well done regarding best practices for performance? That is using separate physical disks for data and logs, not using RAID5, etc.
When you say deleting millions of rows is "too intense for SQL server", what do you mean? Do you mean that the log file grows too much during the delete?
All you should have to do is execute the delete in batches of a fixed size:
DECLARE #i INT
SET #i = 1
WHILE #i > 0
BEGIN
DELETE TOP 10000 FROM dbo.SuperBigTable
WHERE CategoryID = 743
SELECT #i = ##ROWCOUNT
END
If your database is in full recovery mode, you will have to run frequent transaction log backups during this process so that it can reuse the space in the log. If the database is in simple mode, you shouldn't have to do anything.
My only other recommendation is to make sure that you have an appropriate index in CategoryId. I might even recommend that this be the clustered index.
If you want to optimize on a category delete clustered composite index with category at the first place might do more good than damage.
Also you could describe the relationships on the table.
It sounds like the transaction log is struggling with the size of the delete. The transaction log grows in units, and this takes time whilst it allocates more disk space.
It is not possible to delete rows from a table without enlisting a transaction, although it is possible to truncate a table using the TRUNCATE command. However this will remove all rows in the table without condition.
I can offer the following suggestions:
Switch to a non-transactional database or possibly flat files. It doesn't sound like you need atomicity of a transactional database.
Attempt the following. After every x deletes (depending on size) issue the following statement
BACKUP LOG WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY;
This simply truncates the transaction log, the space remains for the log to refill. However Im not sure howmuch time this will add to the operation.
What do you do with the star data? If you only look at data for one category at any given time this might work, but it is hard to maintain. Every time you have a new category, you will have to build a new table. If you want to query across categories, it becomes more complex and possibly more expensive in terms of time. If you do this and do want to query across categories a view is probably best (but do not pile views on top of views). If you are looking for data on a particular star, would you know which table to query? If not then how are you going to determine which table or are you goign to query them all? When entering data, how will the application decide which table to put the data into? How many categories will there be? And incidentally relating to each having a separate id, use the bigint identities and combine the identity with the category type for your unique identifier.
Truly do you need to delete the whole category or only the star that the data changed for?
And do you need to delete at all, maybe you only need to update information.
Have you tried deleting in batches (1000 records or so at a time in a loop). This is often much faster than deleting a million records in one delete statement. It often keeps the table from getting locked during the delete as well.
Another technique is mark the record for deletion. Then you can run a batch process when usage is low to delete those records and your queries can run on a view that excludes the records marked for deletion.
Given your answers, I think your proposal may be reasonable.
I know this is a bit of a tangent, but is SQL Server (or any relational database) really a good tool for this job? What relation database features are you actually using?
If you are dropping whole categories at a time, you can't have much referential integrity depending on it. The data is read only, so you don't need ACID for data updates.
Sounds to me like you are using basic SELECT query features?
Just taking your idea of many tables - how can you realise that...
What about using dynamic queries.
create the table of categories that have identity category_id column.
create the trigger on insert for this tale - in it create table for stars with the name dynamically made from category_id.
create the trigger on delete - in it drop the corresponding stars table also with the help of dynamically created sql.
to select stars of concrete category you can use function that returns table. It will take category_id as a parameter and return result also through dynamic query.
to insert stars of new category you firstly insert new row in categories table and then insert stars to appropriate table.
Another direction in which I would make some researches is using xml typed column for storing stars data. The main idea here is if you need to operate stars only by categories than why not to store all stars of concrete category in one cell of the table in xml format. Unfortunately I absolutely cannot imaging what will be the performance of such decision.
Both this variants are just like ideas in brainstorm.
As Cade pointed out, adding a table for each category is manually partitioning the data, without the benefits of the unified access.
There will never be any deletions for millions of rows that happen as fast as dropping a table, without the use of partitions.
Therefore, it seems like using a separate table for each category may be a valid solution. However, since you've stated that some of these categories are kept, and some are deleted, here is a solution:
Create a new stars table for each new
category.
Wait for the time period to expire where you decide whether the stars for the category are kept or not.
Roll the records into the main stars table if you plan on keeping them.
Drop the table.
This way, you will have a finite number of tables, depending on the rate you add categories and the time period where you decide if you want them or not.
Ultimately, for the categories that you keep, you're doubling the work, but the extra work is distributed over time. Inserts to the end of the clustered index may be experienced less by the users than deletes from the middle. However, for those categories that you're not keeping, you're saving tons of time.
Even if you're not technically saving work, perception is often the bigger issue.
I didn't get an answer to my comment on the original post, so I am going under some assumptions...
Here's my idea: use multiple databases, one for each category.
You can use the managed ESE database that ships with every version of Windows, for free.
Use the PersistentDictionary object, and keep track of the starid, starname pairs that way. If you need to delete a category, just delete the PersistentDictionary object for that category.
PersistentDictionary<int, string> starsForCategory = new PersistentDictionary<int, string>("Category1");
This will create a database called "Category1", on which you can use standard .NET dictionary methods (add, exists, foreach, etc).