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

Exploring the types of indexes

Based on storage type, the index structure is different for each data storage type; these can be disk-based row store indexes, column store indexes, and memory-optimized indexes. Let’s discuss the most important indexes along with some examples.

We will review the types of indexes next.

Clustered indexes

These are an integral part of SQL Server and are used to organize data based on the clustered index value. This type of index allows for the pages of data to be ordered in a specific way, allowing for faster reads and queries. The clustered index then stores the actual data rows in the table, so each table can only have one clustered index. When creating a clustered index, it is important to choose a column or columns that will be used frequently in searches and queries, as this will improve the performance of the database.

Clustered indexes are created using the CLUSTERED keyword in the CREATE statement.

Because the database tables...