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Wise Owl have found one SQL structure which slows down code more than any other
If your stored procedures or SQL queries are running slowly, don't bother looking at correlated subqueries, cursors, functions or any of the other usual culprits. There's one SQL syntax which Wise Owl have found to be an order of magnitude worse than any other, as this blog shows.

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 May 2019

Stored procedure running slowly? Here's the likely culprit

In general our stored procedures aren't that time-critical: we just don't have enough data for them to matter. But one procedure was seizing up our internal Intranet. It used lots of possible culprits:

Possible culprit	Notes
User-defined functions	Everything I read says that scalar functions are slow.
Multiple criteria	My SQL statement had about 15 criteria in.
Nested functions	One scalar function called another.

I tried removing all of these, but the procedure still took over 10 seconds to run. Finally, I found the culprit - some really sloppy programming, because I'm always short of time when I write these things:

-- use main address if gmail, etc

IF EXISTS (

SELECT *

FROM tblUrlHome AS u

WHERE u.UrlHomeName = @DomainMain

)

SET @email = @EmailAddress

So I changed this to code which is almost as sloppy:

-- use main address if gmail, etc

DECLARE @NumberMain AS int = (

SELECT COUNT(*)

FROM tblUrlHome AS u

WHERE u.UrlHomeName = @DomainMain

)

IF @NumberMain > 0

SET @email = @EmailAddress

The difference? The use of IF EXISTS within a function. Lots of websites will tell you the SQL structures you should avoid, but this seems to me to be an order of magnitude slower than correlated subqueries, dynamic SQL, scalar functions, cursors and any of the other usual suspects.

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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