This week’s installment in the series on efficient data is all about data types. Be smart about choosing them; The right type for the right job will not only store your data in less physical space and enforce data integrity better, but smaller indexes and tables will also improve overall query performance.
storage
Efficient data, part 4: Fill factor
A quick way to improve I/O performance is to set a good fill factor. This installment of the series on efficient data discusses fill factors and page splits, and how they affect physical I/O performance.
Efficient data, part 2: Partitioning
This is the second part in a series on storing and modelling data efficiently. A great way to add performance to your data is to partition it. Like the name implies, partitioning splits a table or index into multiple partitions, so the data can be stored across multiple physical files and drives. Partitioning is a feature of SQL Server Enterprise Edition, but if you have one, you’re in luck!
Efficient data, part 1: Normalization
We’ve talked a lot about optimizing queries and query performance, but we haven’t really touched that much on the storage and data modelling aspects. In this series of post, I’ll run through some basic tips on how you can more efficiently model and store your data, which may come in particularly handy when you’re working with large databases and large transaction volumes, but a lot of it also makes good design sense in smaller databases.
In this first article, we’ll cover the normalized data model.
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