I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a while now, (OK, for several years…..) - finally now, here it begins

First post, something really simple but, a wise-man once told me about the best way to improve SQL server performance.

Store Less Data.

That's it.. that's all there is to it...

Over the years, I've seen the following :-

-  a 200Gb database which held 3 days data. Once business requirements changed, we were able to hold only 1 days data in this database.

-  a table developed by DBAs to hold application table cardinality information - that information was collected at 2 hour intervals every day for 7 years ! After 7 years the DBA space-info table had become the largest table in the database - 60 million rows !  It was a simple change to remove alot of the historical intra-day data and change the schedule to run only once per evening. Suddenly that table held 6 million rows instead of 60 million....

- lots of backup and restore history held in msdb. See this post by Brent Ozar for more details on this issue.

Imagine how much faster the backups, DBCC Checks and reindexes ran when the above 3 changes were implemented ?

How often do you review your big databases \ tables to see if you’re actually holding only data that is really required by the business ?