SQL performance can be a significant concern for some data-intensive industries. For example, the volume of data processed in the healthcare industry is expected to increase at an annual growth rate of over 35% through 2025. A delay of a few seconds per record could result in thousands of hours of wasted time for just a single healthcare data center.

SQL performance, however, can be impacted by a number of latency issues. Here are two examples of SQL performance issues and their solutions.

SQL Server Timeouts

SQL timeouts can come in two different ways.

1. A communications timeout can occur when communication delays between the SQL server and the querying server or device cause too much time to elapse between the query and the response.
2. A command timeout can occur when the SQL server cannot find a response to a query before a preset time has elapsed. In other words, the device or server can communicate with the SQL server, but the SQL server itself is “running too slow.”

A command timeout often occurs as a result of fractured and randomized I/O. By the way it handles I/O, SQL servers inherently introduce messy I/O. As a result, SQL servers cannot avoid delays in writing to, and reading from, the SQL database.

V-Locity is designed to clean up this messy I/O. It uses DRAM caching to create continuous reads and writes rather than fragmented reads and writes. The result is that the records are more cleanly stored and, thus, can be more cleanly retrieved.

Fragmented Storage

Because SQL servers have a messy I/O, the SQL databases become fragmented. The fragmented way that SQL servers is not visibly obvious — the records will look fine on the screen. However, delays in retrieving the records from the database will be obvious in the time wasted between queries and responses.

When addressing SQL performance issues, SQL solutions must include defragmenting data storage. Contrary to how you might imagine a hard disc drive, it does not store a record in a continuous read. Rather, the disc tries to maximize efficiency by writing into available fragments using available addresses. However, over time, these fragments accumulate and, eventually, the hard drive spends as much, or more, time hunting down fragments as it does to retrieving data. The result is severe performance issues.

Fragmented storage can be solved in two ways.

1. Acting proactively. Since fragmentation is a known issue with SQL servers (as well as any personal computer), V-locity’s IntelliWrite® and IntelliMemory® I/O optimization technology can be used from the start to prevent hard disc drives from becoming fragmented.
2. Defragmenting. Diskeeper® 18 can defragment hard disc drives that have already become fragmented.

Whether your SQL server has already bogged down and is underperforming as a result of messy I/O and fragmented hard disc drives, or you have acquired a new system and want to avoid the inevitable SQL performance issues, software-based SQL solutions are available to optimize the performance of your SQL server.