http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/ Practical information for anyone who wants to develop fast, efficient software en http://drdobbs.com/web-development/229218866 This month I'm delighted to be featured in the prestigious Dr Dobb's Journal. Check out my article on how to ditch multi-threading and connection pools, and improve your database OLTP throughput by batching queries. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2010-09/testing-character-types/ Look-up tables are an ideal way of testing whether characters are of a particular type, and are commonly used in C for functions such as isupper, isdigit etc. You can also use them for your own custom classification tests. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2010-09/why-is-my-index-not-used/ You're very pleased with yourself: you've created your index, and are feeling supremely confident that your query is now going to run much faster. But something's wrong. The query is still slow, and your index is not being used at all. What's going on? It can be confusing, frustrating, and sometimes downright annoying, but there are plenty of simple reasons why your bright shiny index gets ignored. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2010-09/introduction-to-lookup-tables/ Look-up tables are a common performance tool that allows us to use values or results that have been calculated ahead of time, i.e. in advance of when they are needed. This introduction discusses why and how you might use a look-up table. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2010-09/indexes-are-all-around-part-2/ The second part of this introduction to relational database indexing looks at the most common type of index that we use. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2010-08/indexes-are-all-around-part-1/ As an introduction to the wonderful world of relational database indexing, I take a look at some common real-life indexes that we use every day. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2008-10/sybtop/ For those of you who prefer the good old-fashioned command line, rather than all that fancy graphical user interface stuff, here is a handy script that provides a "top"-like display of blocked, blocking, and running processes on a Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database server. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2008-09/worst-performance-mistakes/ I've come across some howlers in my time. So I thought it only fair to share some of these with you for your entertainment. Names have been witheld to protect the guilty. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2008-07/the-curse-of-the-name-value-pair/ When it comes to storing objects in a relational database, one of the worst performance decisions that can be made is to use name-value pairs. In this article I give you a couple of techniques for avoiding them, as well as some ways of improving performance if you insist on using them anyway. http://www.sturnus.co.uk/performance/2008-07/the-dreaded-scalable-word/ Find out why I hate it when people use the word "scalable", what it actually means, and why, ultimately, it may not be what they want.