I am looking for the total balance for all accounts that had a negative balance as of a specific point in time. I've already got the code below, and it works, but works horribly.
The transactions table contains 20 million rows. The query below takes about 30 seconds which isn't bad, but there's a second part in that I need to repeat @report_date for the first of every month since the inception of the database, which balloons the execution time to ~30 minutes.
This is on MSSQL2008 and I'm not getting any missing indexes warnings on the execution plan, but I suspect my problem is still with the indexes so I'm intentionally leaving them off of here.
CREATE TABLE transactions(
transaction_id int,
account_id int,
department_id int,
location_id int,
post_date date,
amount money
);
SELECT
t2.department_id,
t2.location_id,
SUM(t2.credit_balances)
FROM
(
SELECT
t1.department_id,
t1.location_id,
t1.account_id,
SUM(t1.amount) as credit_balances
FROM
transactions t1
WHERE
t1.post_date < @report_date
GROUP BY
t1.department_id,
t1.location_id,
t1.account_id
HAVING
SUM(t1.amount) < 0
) t2
GROUP BY
t2.department_id,
t2.location_id;
The table contains 38 distinct department_id,location_id
combinations, and 4.5 million distinct department_id,location_id,account_id
.
Best Answer
As you are repeating this query for multiple months then you will be continually re-aggregating the same rows.
For example the rows in the first month will always be brought back by the
t1.post_date < @report_date
criteria so will be re-processed for every month.To avoid this I'd probably consider working through it in an iterative way a month at a time from the start. Dependent on the volatility of historic data I might also consider storing the pre-calculated results in the database rather than re-calculating these each month.
To calculate this at run time you could create a temporary table with the following structure.
You could also consider adding the following index on your
transactions
tableThen extract a month at a time from
transactions
and merge into#balance
(with a when matched then increment, when not matched insert).The leading
post_date_year_month
column means that as long as you write the query sargably the extraction of each month can be done efficiently and the extracted rows for a month will be ordered bydepartment_id, location_id, account_id
making a merge join against#balance
possible without a sort.Whilst that could benefit this particular query you'd need to assess the utility of this index against your overall workload.
Then calculate the
department_id, location_id
totals from#balance
(can leverage the PK order to avoid a sort) and store those somewhere and move onto the next month.(Or possibly instead of
#balance
you could use a "temporary" permanent tablebalance
and create an indexed view on that to avoid the separate explicit aggregation step and just copy the values straight from that before moving on)