Table Designing – One of the Most Effective Ways to Ensure Database Performance

Tuning the database to ensure effective performance is a continuous process. This is owing to the fact that there is always something or the other cropping up within the database that needs to be addressed. Therefore, for an efficient performance there are certain common things that the database administrator should keep in mind. The final aim of database is to maximize the utility of the resources found in a system that would perform efficiently and rapidly. Most of these systems are designed in way so that they can control the use of the system resources.

One of the most effective ways to tune database performance is by designing the tables efficiently. These are some of the ways in which the tables should be designed:

Triggers are important

It is vital to look out for the triggers. Use the triggers on the specific database tables so that there is a solution for specific problems. For enforcing a difficult constraint the triggers can prove effective. However, it should be remembered that once the trigger is put into action by an SQL statement, then all the work that ensues becomes the part of that particular SQL statement. This will actually lead to slowing down the statement and can affect the performance big time if the trigger is fired often.

Using similar data for key columns

While defining a foreign and primary key it is advisable not to use VARCHAR data type for primary key and the CHAR one for the foreign key. It is better to maintain the same data type for both the keys. If a table is joined with different data types then the DBMS will be required to convert the data types to the same kind. This is an additional work. It also leads to slowing down of the joins that take place between tables having various data types.

While picking a data type for a numeric column the smallest kind of data type should be chosen to hold the data. This will help in saving a lot of space as well. Another tip is to use CHAR if the entries have the same length. In order to adopt such professional measures a number of service providers can actually prove helpful. The Remotedba.com is one such database management solution provider.

Mitigating disk writes and reads

Database performance can be enhanced by reducing the reading and writing from the disk. Performing these tasks from the actual hard drive on which the database is stored is quite a costly procedure as far as database performance is concerned. Operations that are read and written to and from the disk are also called I/O operations. But it is important to remember that the best has to be done with the available memory. Therefore the disk read and write have to be reduced to the minimum.

The I/O operations can be reduced in various ways. One of the options is to use more than one disk drive. When you have multiple disk drives at your disposal, it becomes easy to keep the database files on these different disks. If the database files are spread over multiple ones, the I/O operations will take place in a parallel way so that it helps in enhancing the database performance.

Allocating buffers of the right size

Buffer is part of the RAM that is utilized to store data temporarily that has been temporarily been retrieved. If the buffer is of the right size then the already read data will remain in the buffer for a long time. If a same query is issued asking for the already stored data then it would not be any problem to retrieve the same. Buffers can also be used to store data that has been written by the RDBMS for storing temporarily. This is later copied to a permanent storage.