SQL Performance Tuning

Chapter 14. Data Changes

The term data change appears in the SQL Standard document. It means any change to the database that is caused by INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statements. We often refer to such changes as updates (lowercase), but that's a bit confusing because usually UPDATE (uppercase) refers to the UPDATE statement alone. So we'll use “data change” the way the SQL Standard does: to mean an INSERT, an UPDATE, or a DELETE.

Data-change statements occur less frequently than SELECT statements, but a typical data-change statement is slow. For example, compare these two SQL statements:

SELECT column1 FROM Table1
  WHERE column1 = 12345

UPDATE Table1 SET column2 = 10
  WHERE column1 = 12345

Both statements must go through the same retrieval steps to ...