Recently I’ve had a colleague having fits trying to optimize database access to an application that he inherited from a guy who inherited from a guy who…you get the point. I’d suggested speed isssues in indexes to him previously but he told me that several DBAs had looked at it and believe it to be working appropriately. Ok. Well I looked at it and was surprised to find that indexes were not only incorrect they were non-existant other than the primary key index and foreign key contraints. At that point I recalled something from my subscription to the Sql Server Central newletter in an article(Sql Server Central Speed Part 3) which put a nice explanation in to using indexes out there. I forwarded it to my friend and his problems melted away after months of headaches and no answers believing his problems not to be database related.
Understand the difference between a DBA and a Database Developer.
Software developers need to understand when looking for help there is a difference between a DBA and a database developer. Yes a person could be both but typically people come down wearing one hat and developers mistake a DBA for someone who actually knows something about tuning a SQL database. They might be able to make the actual SQL software pur and perform better but they might not know a thing about appropriate indexing for speeds. Although they can tell you hey this index is eating up a lot of space or causing a lot more rewrites and therefore hurting my server they can’t actually speed things up.
Point being that just because a person with database in their titles within your organization tells you it’s right doesn’t mean as a developer you just have to say “ok it’s right”. Having database in a title doesn’t make you an expert on all things database just like people with developer in their title might not know a thing about developing other than drag, drop and deploy.. My suggestion to all software developers is subscribe to a great website like SQL Server Central and read over their newsletter articles because that one 10 minute read you did 6 months ago might save you from months of pain in the future.
Speeding Up SQL Server Part 1
Speeding Up SQL Server Part 2
Speeding Up SQL Server Part 3
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