Overview

When data­bas­es get large, it becomes impor­tant to begin to pay atten­tion to the index­es on the larg­er tables in the SIF agent data­base, espe­cial­ly if you begin to see the per­for­mance of the agent decreas­ing.

Checking Index Performance

The SQL Serv­er Man­age­ment Stu­dio (SSMS) has some built-in reports that can help you deter­mine if you have the prop­er index­es cre­at­ed and if the ones that ahve been cre­at­ed are being used at all. When we (at Visu­al Soft­ware) release a new ver­sion of an agent, we make some guess as to how an agent will be used based on usage infor­ma­tion we an gath­er from oth­er instal­la­tions. This doesn't mean, how­ev­er, that it will be the best for the infor­ma­tion that the agent man­ages from your orga­ni­za­tion — that will depend on the infor­ma­tion that is main­tained at your orga­ni­za­tion, how it is stored and how it is used. For exam­ple, we may make an assump­tion that an aver­age stu­dent may have a home address, a sin­gle home phone num­ber and a sin­gle email address. We cre­ate the tables that store this infor­ma­tion to opti­mal­ly store infor­ma­tion this way. Your orga­ni­za­tion may typ­i­cal­ly store three phone num­bers and two email address­es for each stu­dent and the sub­scrib­ing appli­ca­tions in your zone may fre­quent­ly make requests for this infor­ma­tion. Because of these dif­fer­ences, you may want to add oth­er index­es to the tables RE_PhoneNumber and RE_Email where the phone num­bers and email address­es are stored. To check the performance