Question

Fastest way to retrieve rowcount bounded by time

Asked by: robjay

I have a ~400 million row database yet my query

select count(*)
from table
where time > 'MM/DD/YYYY'
and time < 'MM/DD/YYYY'

when I ask for almost the whole range of the database takes hours++ to run.

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Asked On
2009-10-27 at 05:27:58ID24846934
Topic

SQL Server 2008

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: rrjegan17Posted on 2009-10-27 at 05:35:29ID: 25671661

Make sure you have index created on time column for better performance.

Since you have 400 million rows, you can incorporate Partitioning in that table to improve your query performance further.

 

by: DanielWilsonPosted on 2009-10-27 at 05:50:41ID: 25671775

Also make sure your time column is a DateTime or SmallDateTime column, not a varchar.  Time is an essentially numeric thing, and should only be converted to a text-based type for display purposes.

Some also claim that
Select count(1)
is preferable to
select count(*)
though I do not know for sure on that.

 

by: robjayPosted on 2009-10-30 at 12:05:45ID: 25705926

There was a clustered index on the date columns, so to count the rows I did a count on that column, i.e. I replaced the * with the column name.  Works a whole lot faster now.  

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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