Book Image

SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices

By : Steve Hughes, Dennis Neer, Dr. Ram Babu Singh, Shabbir H. Mala, Leslie Andrews, Chi Zhang
5 (1)
Book Image

SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices

5 (1)
By: Steve Hughes, Dennis Neer, Dr. Ram Babu Singh, Shabbir H. Mala, Leslie Andrews, Chi Zhang

Overview of this book

SQL has been the de facto standard when interacting with databases for decades and shows no signs of going away. Through the years, report developers or data wranglers have had to learn SQL on the fly to meet the business needs, so if you are someone who needs to write queries, SQL Query Design and Pattern Best Practices is for you. This book will guide you through making efficient SQL queries by reducing set sizes for effective results. You’ll learn how to format your results to make them easier to consume at their destination. From there, the book will take you through solving complex business problems using more advanced techniques, such as common table expressions and window functions, and advance to uncovering issues resulting from security in the underlying dataset. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll have a foundation for building queries and be ready to shift focus to using tools, such as query plans and indexes, to optimize those queries. The book will go over the modern data estate, which includes data lakes and JSON data, and wrap up with a brief on how to use Jupyter notebooks in your SQL journey. By the end of this SQL book, you’ll be able to make efficient SQL queries that will improve your report writing and the overall SQL experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Refining Your Queries to Get the Results You Need
6
Part 2: Solving Complex Business and Data Problems in Your Queries
11
Part 3: Optimizing Your Queries to Improve Performance
14
Part 4: Working with Your Data on the Modern Data Platform

Understanding and exploring the Query Execution Plan

Sometimes, we get questions from business users about queries or reports running slowly, and we struggle to understand the root cause and how to fix it. The Query Execution Plan is the answer to that question. Now, you must be wondering what the query execution plan is, right?

There are multiple steps that SQL Server takes to execute the query. The graphical representation of these steps is called the Query Execution Plan. It displays the details of each step, such as the number of actual rows, estimated rows, I/O and CPU cost, percentage of the cost of each step, and so on. Each step in the execution plan is called a node.

Are you wondering what a query execution plan looks like? Here is an example of a query execution plan for the SELECT TOP (1000) * FROM [WideWorldImporters].[Sales].[Customers]; query displaying the nodes of the execution plan:

Figure 9.1 – A sample query execution plan

Figure 9.1 – A sample query execution plan

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