SQL Performance Explained

What Hacker News says

1. jjiceJan 2025
   My personal favorites:

   - Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Martin Fowler) - early-mid 2000s and it stays valuable to this day. It's nice to have a formalized view of concepts you know in practice.

   - Clean Architecture (Robert Martin) - Great application architecture concepts being formalized

   - Designing Data Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann) - Fantastic perspective on your application's data. This is probably the most recommended book I've seen on Hacker News.

   - SQL Performance Explained (Markus Winand) - Just a killer, concise book to make you truly understand basic DB performance, specifically with indexes. I've met so many developers (myself included before this book) who thought any index will work and then they'd just wing it. Your RDBMS has tools for finding the best optimizations in your queries and you should use them. Your indexes are also more picky than you may think, but they're also incredibly fast if you place them correctly. It's a lot easier to see once you understand.

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2. sherburt3Apr 2024
   His book SQL Performance Explained is also very enlightening as well. I think the most useful takeaway I got from that book is that the effectiveness of an index is heavily determined by how the application will be querying that table. If you want to design an effective index for a table you should experiment with multiple options and benchmark the queries that the application is going to run.
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3. tomhallettOct 2023
   Any recommended resources (books, courses, etc) which go deeper on sql topics like this? Comparing and contrasting different ways of writing the same query, with respect to performance.

   The one book I’ve found and really enjoyed was “SQL Performance Explained”.

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4. patrecJun 2023
   Just in case anyone who isn't familiar with Markus's work gets a slightly w3schools vibe when clicking the above link: his book SQL Performance explained[1] is probably the single most useful book a backend developer can read.

   [1] https://sql-performance-explained.com/

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5. throwaway81523Dec 2022
   Book looks good, shovelling the subscription at me was annoying and of course I used a throwaway address and unsubscribed immediately. It's actually probably a newsletter I wouldn't mind getting but the way it was done feels too spammy. I have Markus Winand's book SQL Performance Explained, actually paid for the download, and came away feeling cleaner. I do hear something from him through his mailing list once in a great while, and that is fine. I hope he comes out with another book someday.
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6. jjiceDec 2022
   There were a handful I really enjoyed reading this year, mostly some older stuff. I could never get into fiction, so I'm more of a non-fiction and computer book kind of guy.

   * Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler

   Published in 2005 I believe, but still _very_ relevant. Good concrete architecture patterns and it's cool to see these patterns before they were no-brainers.

   * SQL Performance Explained - Markus Winand

   Actually how I first convinced my company to start paying for my books (and there have been 15+ since). We had a query that was running in an absurd amount of time for our largest customer and we couldn't get it down. It was a real blocker for releasing a feature, so I bought this book while visiting family and tore through it on the plane home. Got that query down from over 10 minutes to about 12 seconds. Through a light caching layer in front and we were cooking with gas. Part of that query's long runtime is definitely due to a poor initial implementation, but this book taught me a lot about indexes and how they're not being used constantly like I thought they were.

   * Clean Architecture - Robert Martin

   Always recommended around here. Finally gave it a read and the central message of dependency inversion is a good one. I took a "software engineering" course in Uni that taught us SOLID principles in a text book way where we didn't actually apply them, but working in the real world has taught me that they're appropriate in many cases, and why that's the case. Uncle Bob does a great job demonstrating that.

   * Your Money or Your Life - Vicky Robin and Joe Dominguez

   I reread this about once a year so I'm going to count it :) Fantastic book that keeps the concept of money and what is really does for us grounded. Helps me keep my expenses down by not being a nut with money. Working in software is a very fortunate career path for a lot of us, and I want to make sure I can make the most of it.

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