Can you recommend some resources to achieve (b)? Just basic stuff without going full guru on every little detail.
Or do you just mean using indexes basically? I'm just not sure how many unknown unknowns I have wrt sql.
Or do you just mean using indexes basically? I'm just not sure how many unknown unknowns I have wrt sql.
1. Trace your application, so you know which query is running slowly in production.
2. Using this exact query, run `EXPLAIN ANALYZE` or whatever your RDBMS equivalent is.
3. Read the output, see which step is taking the slowest. Use google to help.
4. Google-fu until you find out which index might help you.
Over time, (3) and (4) requires less and less Google, because there's really only a few common cases that give you 100% of the speedup in 80% of cases.
Once you know this path to improvement exists, it's trivial to progress down it habitually. The `EXPLAIN ANALYZE` output looks like Greek at first, but quickly becomes as familiar to parse as a compiler error, etc.