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Work has been quieter lately, so I’ve been thinking about some problems we encountered during the project. The most obvious one is that queries become very slow when a table contains a large amount of data. From the user’s perspective, either the system feels poorly built and sluggish, or something seems to be broken. The wait for query results on the page makes both impressions immediately apparent.
So far, I can think of a few areas to improve:
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Developers’ SQL skills: write efficient queries that work well with the existing database structure.
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Table design: consider how much data a table may eventually hold, and whether useful indexes should be planned when the table is first created.
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Once a table becomes too large, how can we partition it effectively to improve query speed? We also need to consider the implications of partitioning as a whole. I haven’t started working on this yet.