Re:How Does the SQL Server Query Optimizer Work?
by jws on Thursday January 19, 2017 @06:36PM
(#13440469)
Back in the mid '90s Digital's RDB (an early SQL database) had a companion product, Rdb Expert, which would analyze a live database over a period of time and make a script to set up its indices (ordered and hashed) and table placement rules to optimize a database.
It wasn't as good as a really good expert, but it was at least a 90% solution.
As I recall it was pretty good at getting a tuple and its one to many associated tuples into the same disk page so you needed fewer disk reads to access data. These were disks that were capable of about 35 seeks per second, so it really mattered.
(The drive I'm thinking of is the RA90. 1.2GB in a half of a 6U or so space. 32kg. 280 watts.)
It wasn't as good as a really good expert, but it was at least a 90% solution.
As I recall it was pretty good at getting a tuple and its one to many associated tuples into the same disk page so you needed fewer disk reads to access data. These were disks that were capable of about 35 seeks per second, so it really mattered.
(The drive I'm thinking of is the RA90. 1.2GB in a half of a 6U or so space. 32kg. 280 watts.)