Doesn't Read-Only make a difference for SQL Server?

Question

I’ve been tasked with optimizing a rather nasty stored procedure in a legacy system. It’s a database dedicated to search, and a new copy is being generate every day, with a lot of complex joins being de-normalized. No writes are being performed, only SELECTs, so I figured some easy improvements could be made by making the whole database read-only and changing the recovery model to “Simple”.

Much to my surprise, this didn’t help – at all! The stored procedure still takes the same amount of time of complete. If fact, I’m so surprised that I figured I did it wrong!

My questions:

• Do I need to do anything other than setting “Database read-only” to “true”?
• Am I wrong to expect significant performance improvement by making the database read-only?
• Same for the recovery model: Shouldn’t “Simple” have some noticeable impact?
• Are there other similar database-wide configurations that can improve performance in this scenario?

The stored procedure is huge, with temporary tables, 40+ tables joined in 20+ queries. But I’d like to optimize the database itself before I edit this proc.

Answer 1

Since no writes are performed by your SP, there is no reason to expect noticable performance improvement from changing recovery model and read-write mode.

As others mentioned, you should look into the query plan and optimize your queries.

Another hint: indexes in the database might get fragmented while the database is filled up. Since the data is not going to be modified any more, it might help to rebuild all the indexes with fillfactor 100 - this might help to get rid of fragmentation and to compact data.
Call this for each table in the database: ALTER INDEX ALL ON table_name REBUILD WITH (FILLFACTOR = 100).
Generally, I won't expect much of performance improvement from this, but it depends on the particular database.

Speaking of query optimization, there are very useful features in SQL Server 2005 and later: Execution Related and Index-Related Dynamic Management Views. In particular, sys.dm_exec_query_stats and missing indexes are of interest.
These give you almost the same information as Tuning Advisor, but using you real-life workload, so you don't need to simulate it and feed to the Advisor.

Answer 2

Have you tried using the Database Engine Tuning Advisor included in SQL Server? It will analyze your query and suggest new indexes that will improve the performance of the query. Some of them will be good, some will be bad (for example, I've seen it suggest adding every column in a table to an index, sometimes like 30 of them!), so I don't follow it blindly. Generally I'll add a few indexes and then retest, to find the suggestions that are the most important. I've used it to optimize many queries that I thought I had properly indexed, only to find I could get a lot more performance out of them.