What does database query and insert speed depend on?

Question

At my work we have a small database (as in two hundred tables and maybe a total of a million of rows or so).

I\'ve always expected it to be quite fast in the order of se

Answer 1

To have a rough comparison: the TPC-C benchmark record for SQL Server is at around 1.2 mil transactions per minute, and is been like this over last 4 years or so (caped by the 64 CPU OS limit). That is something in the balpark of ~16k transactions per second. This is on super high end machines, 64 CPUs, plenty of RAM, affinitized clients per NUMA node and a serverly short stripped I/O system (only about like 1-2% of each spindle is used). Bear in mind those are TPC-C transactions, so they consist of several operations (I think is 4-5 reads and 1-2 writes each in average).

Now you should scale down this top of the line hardware to your actual deployment and will get the ballpark where to set your expectations for overal OLTP transaction processing.

For data upload the current world record is about 1TB in 30 minutes (if is still current...). Several tens of thousands of inserts per second is quite ambitious, but achievable, when properly done on serious hardware. The article in the link contains tips and tricks for ETL high troughput (eg. use multiple upload streams and affinitize them to NUMA nodes).

For your situation I would advise first and foremost measure so you find out the bottlenecks and then ask specific questions how to solve specific botlenecks. A good starting point is the Waits and Queues whitepaper.