Congratulations! You’re an entrepreneur and your business has been running smoothly for a while now. You work around the clock and are proud of your achievements. With every milestone, you get a longer list of clients. And with a longer list of clients, you get an expanding database.
As a result, you figured that using Sybase might serve your business well. Not only does it provide practical storage space, it also makes retrieval a lot easier. But is there anything you can do to make its use even more efficient?
Yes, my friends. Yes, there is.
1. Specify Growth Projection
If you’re using ASE 15, it’s for a reason. You’re probably storing more data than Twitter after Kim Kardashian broke the Internet. If this is a continuing trend and you know for a fact that you will be adding rows and columns on a regular basis, specify it. You can estimate it by taking into account whether you’re expanding your customer base (and at which rate), keeping existing customers’ information for a specific timeframe once your relationship ends, how much analytics information you will need, etc.
2. Tuning Indexes
Proper indexing is essential to get relevant query results. Because clustered indexes have fewer rows per page, a query will turn up results faster.
3. Mind Foreign Key Constraints
If you want to ensure consistency between one table and the next, you need foreign key constraints. This will prevent several different items with the same name from popping up when you enter a query.
4. Monitor CPU Usage
Sybase’s Stream Processor should use CPUs evenly across all available central processing units. If the retrieval seems slow, log in to your ASE server to see if the load is too high.
5. Avoid Using Co-Related Subqueries
If you do this, you’re going to get inefficient search results and will have to sort through a lot of irrelevant information. Time is money, and co-related subqueries is a guaranteed way to waste lots of both.
6. Collect Performance Data
The same way you use Google Analytics to know how your website is doing, monitoring Sybase data will allow you to know whether you should modify packet sizes or SQL when transferring or retrieving data.
7. Lock, Lock, Lock
How do you like it when several people are working on a Word document at the same time, then you end up with several documents of the same file? How do you know which one is the version you need? The same happens with any type of data in a multi-user environment.
8. Process in Several Partitions
If you’re working with large tables, partitioning them will provide you with faster query results. It’s also a double whammy since it allows for easier scalability.
9. Identify Efficiency Limits and Modify Accordingly
The only thing in life that is unlimited is your mother’s love for you. At some point, as you include additional data, performance may become slower. If you monitor this carefully, you’ll know when it’s time to increase memory or to use a network with a wider bandwidth.
10. When in Doubt, Call Soaring Eagle Database Consulting
If this entire blog feels like you’re trying to understand instructions in Chinese (and you don’t speak Chinese), contact us. We’d love to make the process easier for you.
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