Lesson Learned #158: Running a Insert Into …. Select when the source table is a Heap Table

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Azure Database Support Blog articles.

Today, I worked on a service request where I found an interesting situation running an Insert Into ... Select command when the source table is a heap table. In this situation, I saw an additional sorting operation that depending on the number of rows of the source might take some resource and time. 

 

Background

 

  • I have a table called source that is a heap table using the following definition. 

 

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Source]( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Name] [varchar](200) NULL ) ON [PRIMARY]

 

  • I have a table called target that has the following definition. 

 

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Target]( [ID] [int] NOT NULL, [NAME] [varchar](200) NULL, PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ( [ID] ASC )WITH (STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = OFF) ON [PRIMARY] ) ON [PRIMARY] CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [tARGET1] ON [dbo].[Target] ( [NAME] ASC )WITH (STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, DROP_EXISTING = OFF, ONLINE = OFF, OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = OFF) ON [PRIMARY] GO

 

  • I executed the following command to insert data from source to target table. 

 

TRUNCATE TABLE Target INSERT INTO Target (id,name) select id,name from Source

 

  • I saw in the execution plan two additional sort operators. First for clustered index and second for the additional index that the table target has. 

 

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  • If the source table has a clustered index in its definition the process will save around 6 seconds because it is not needed to sort the Source table. 

 

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  • In this situation, it is clear that depending on the target table definition SQL Server is performing additional operations that will take an additional time. For this reason, I performed the following changes reducing around 1 minute the execution for this workload:
    • Adding a PK (Clustered) in the Source table to have the same definition in terms of PK with target table. 
    • Removing the additional index in the Target table leaving only the PK. 
    • Run the INSERT INTO .. SELECT taking around 1 minute and 52 seconds. 
    • Creating the additional index in the Target table that took 26 seconds. Reducing more than 1 minute the execution of this query.

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Enjoy!!!

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