I’ve been scouring my notes (old & new), wading through all my previous research and unearthing advice, tips & tricks that have all helped me in some way or another.

In this series of blog posts, I hope to share a mixture of them with you – some may be simple things you’ve heard read about a thousand times but the hope is that some of you out there, find something in this series they hadn’t heard about or possibly had even forgotten about !

These are simple but still effective !

Thin out your table columns

Obviously by reducing the overall size of your table, query performance will benefit. 

One way of doing this is by trying to implement char/varchar columns instead of nchar/nvarchar (unless you want to use Unicode of course)

Ditch the dictionary

By default, when sorting Dictionary sort order is used.

Try using Binary sort order instead. It is quicker and easier.

Its not case-insensitive and it is based on the numeric values (from 0 through 255) of the characters in the installed character set.