A few weeks ago, I was on a call with one of my mentees and he was creating a plan for a consultancy project he was working on. They were having issues with pages taking more than 30s.

He had a great plan with many steps on how to implement a data warehouse and how they would clean the transactional tables every now and then to keep it “small”.

After hearing his plan, and giving him some architecture advice on the design and where it could go wrong, I proposed him to try something 100x simpler.

Analyze the queries and make sure every query gets to an index. Preferably a composite index that will meet the query fields. We talked about it for a while, I took some time to explain why that would work and how indexes work on databases (nerds).

And now I just got a message from him, “I just got a message from my customer Manager thanking me, one simple index improved the time to load one of the main pages from 30s to ~1s”.

Money saved, stress saved, and the simplicity wins for all. When trying to solve a problem, try to consider what would be a small change that could maybe solve this situation, that may be a great or even the best solution.

Source

Throw Less at the Problem