Here you will find a collection of news and articles that you may find useful. New features are added regularly, so please check back or subscribe.

Featured in Dr Dobb's Journal: Improving Database OLTP Throughput via Batching

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

Introduction To Look-up 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 them. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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 ignoring my advice and using them anyway. Read more.

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. Read more.