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Chapter 10. Outside-the-Box Solutions to Seemingly Unsolvable Problems

It is not every question that deserves an answer.

Publilius Syrus (a.k.a. Publius) Maxim 581

Computers are fast enough that they never have to be the bottleneck in a business process. When they turn out to be a bottleneck, solutions always exist. However, the solutions do not always take the form of answers to the question "How do I make this query return the same rows faster?" So far, this book has focused on answering that single question, and Chapter 9 described a few circumstances in which satisfactory answers to that question do not exist. This chapter takes the performance problem out of that self-imposed box and considers how to solve the rare query runtime problems that cannot be solved just by tuning a given statement.



    		Preface
    		Chapter 1. Introduction
    		Chapter 2. Data-Access Basics
    		Chapter 3. Viewing and Interpreting Execution Plans
    		Chapter 4. Controlling Execution Plans
    		Chapter 5. Diagramming Simple SQL Queries
    		Chapter 6. Deducing the Best Execution Plan
    		Chapter 7. Diagramming and Tuning Complex SQL Queries
    		Chapter 8. Why the Diagramming Method Works
    		Chapter 9. Special Cases
    		Chapter 10. Outside-the-Box Solutions to Seemingly Unsolvable Problems
    		10.1 When Very Fast Is Not Fast Enough
    		10.2 Queries that Return Data from Too Many Rows
    		10.3 Tuned Queries that Return Few Rows, Slowly
    		Appendix A. Exercise Solutions
    		Appendix B. The Full Process, End to End
    		Glossary