At Wayfair, we are never done. And the DBA team here is a true example of it. We are constantly looking to improve performance and we rigorously tune our databases on a daily basis. We are always looking at ways to have our queries run faster – by maintaining indexes, optimizing queries and procedures, creating any missing indexes based on query usage, generating statistics on currently running queries, and filtering out queries with top CPU usage, among other improvements. Of late, we’ve been trying to eliminate any implicit data type conversions that happen at runtime. Implicit data type conversions come with cost, especially when the conversion is performed at the column side of the query – not the literal side. We have had scenarios where for high volume processing jobs (processing millions of records) we had index scan execution on queries due to implicit conversions. A simple demonstration of an implicit conversion is: WHERE a.OrderID = b.OrderNo; a.OrderID being varchar(30) and b.OrderNo is nvarchar(30). Here the execution plan would do an implicit cast to nvarchar(30) and would perform an index scan operation on the millions of records – with you waiting endlessly for the query or job to finish. Continue reading →