A Book For Developers

SQL performance books are tomes.

Hundreds of pages filled with knowledge…
…not relevant to developers.

SQL Performance Explained focuses on what developers need to know.

Just 200 pages…
…yet covering all major databases.

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Paperback also available at Amazon.com.

(paperback only, paid link)

0. Preface

1. Anatomy of an Index

   1. The Leaf Nodes

   2. The B-Tree

   3. Slow Indexes, Part I

2. The Where Clause

   1. The Equals Operator

      1. Primary Keys

      2. Concatenated Keys

      3. Slow Indexes, Part II

   2. Functions

      1. Case-Insensitive Search

      2. User-Defined Functions

      3. Over-Indexing

   3. Bind Variables

   4. Searching for Ranges

      1. Greater, Less and BETWEEN

      2. Indexing LIKE Filters

      3. Index Combine

   5. Partial Indexes

   6. NULL in the Oracle Database

      1. NULL in Indexes

      2. NOT NULL Constraints

      3. Emulating Partial Indexes

   7. Obfuscated Conditions

      1. Dates

      2. Numeric Strings

      3. Combining Columns

      4. Smart Logic

      5. Math

3. Testing and Scalability

   1. Data Volume

   2. System Load

   3. Response Time and Throughput

4. The Join Operation

   1. Nested Loops

   2. Hash Join

   3. Sort-Merge Join

5. Clustering Data

   1. Index Filter Predicates Intentionally Used

   2. Index-Only Scan

   3. Index-Organized Table

6. Sorting and Grouping

   1. Indexed ORDER BY

   2. ASC/DESC and NULL FIRST/LAST

   3. Indexed GROUP BY

7. Partial Results

   1. Selecting Top-N Rows

   2. Fetching The Next Page

   3. Window-Functions

8. Insert, Delete and Update

   1. Insert

   2. Delete

   3. Update

9. Execution Plans