Looking through some of my databases this past week, theres a lot of data there which over time has become redundant and rarely (if ever) used.

So I thought why don’t I just bin it ? I got backups, I could even ship it out to an archived version of my database or even a data-warehouse.

This will improve query performance in a big way, as the optimiser obviously will have less work to do.

Then I realised, we have a legal obligation to keep this data online !

But have a look at your data, determine whether its required or not, if not – carry out some housekeeping, and watch your query performance accelerate !