1.5 Outside-the-Box SolutionsFinally, this book discusses outside-the-box solutions: what to do about cases in which you cannot make an individual query fast enough, when treating the query as a spec for what the application requires at that point, just tuning that single query, does not solve the problem. This brings up a class of problems where you really do need to pay some attention to what the application does, when you cannot just treat it as an abstract black box that needs a specified set of rows from some specified tables. Even so, there are some reliable rules of thumb for the kinds of application-level changes that are likely to solve these types of problems. You will likely need to work with developers who know the application details ( assuming you do not) to solve these problems, but by understanding the rules you can still offer valuable suggestions without application-specific knowledge. |