Database Setup For Best Performance

This document helps you decide the Best Practices for setting up your database.

Use internal database for best performance.

The “internal” database is optimized for performance and database size for Sawmill’s specific usage, and generally outperforms an external SQL server on equivalent hardware. However, an enterprise-scale SQL server, especially a cluster, may provide higher performance than the internal database, if the SQL server hardware is much faster than the Sawmill server.

When using MS SQL, performance of ODBC imports are sometimes very slow, on the order of 100 rows per second. For best performance, configure the profile to use BULK_INSERT to load data into Sawmill, which can run 10,000 rows per second or faster.

When using an external SQL database, Sawmill cannot use its efficient representation of “unique” fields like “visitors” or “sessions,” in cross-reference groups. This can make cross- reference groups very large and slow when using a high volume of data. For best performance, remove unique fields from cross-reference groups (and associated reports), or remove the cross- reference groups entirely. See below for more information on cross-reference groups.

Pre-Sales support is strongly recommended for large datasets

If you are considering Sawmill for a very large dataset (more than 200 million lines of data), it is recommended that you contact Sawmill technical support in advance, to get expert guidance with your profile configuration. There is no charge for pre-sales technical consultations, and it is very likely to improve your initial experience of Sawmill.

Contact support@sawmill.net for pre-sales support.