CockroachDB was designed to be a scalable, distributed, transactional database system. It is capable of delivering the demands of high-performance, highly available, globally distributed applications. However, it’s not a magic box that can eliminate all inefficiencies in application code or schema design. From time to time, developers and applications will send SQL statements to a database that do not run as fast as they should. Consequently, since the dawn of time—or at least the emergence of relational databases—SQL tuning has been a major concern for database developers and administrators.
In this chapter, we’ll explain how CockroachDB optimizes SQL statements and how you can help CockroachDB make these queries run faster. We’ll also show you how to find queries that might need tuning, how to determine if those SQL statements are optimized, and discuss ways of making them faster.
Finding Slow SQL
Assuming that we have up-to-date and comprehensive query statistics in place, we should monitor our cluster to identify any problematic SQL statements.
Many applications will log SQL statements or logical transaction times and provide insight into the SQL statements that are performing poorly. However, if we don’t have application-level tracing, CockroachDB itself can provide information about overall SQL execution times.
The best place to start is probably the Statements page on the CockroachDB Console—as shown in Figure 8-1.
Figure 8-1. CockroachDB Console ...
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