1.5 Outside-the-Box Solutions

Finally, this book discusses outside-the-box solutions: what to do about cases in which you cannot make an individual query fast enough, when treating the query as a spec for what the application requires at that point, just tuning that single query, does not solve the problem. This brings up a class of problems where you really do need to pay some attention to what the application does, when you cannot just treat it as an abstract black box that needs a specified set of rows from some specified tables. Even so, there are some reliable rules of thumb for the kinds of application-level changes that are likely to solve these types of problems. You will likely need to work with developers who know the application details (assuming you do not) to solve these problems, but by understanding the rules you can still offer valuable suggestions without application-specific knowledge.