sql server query running slow from java

Question

I have a java program that runs a bunch of queries against an sql server database. The first of these, which queries against a view returns about 750k records. I can run the query via sql server management studio, and I get results in about 30 seconds. however, I kicked off the program to run last night. when I checked on it this morning, this query still had not returned results back to the java program, some 15 hours later.

I have access to the database to do just about anything I want, but I'm really not sure how to begin debugging this. What should one do to figure out what is causing a situation like this? I'm not a dba, and am not intimately familiar with the sql server tool set, so the more detail you can give me on how to do what you might suggest would be appreciated.

heres the code

stmt = connection.createStatement();
clientFeedRS = stmt.executeQuery(StringBuffer.toString());

EDIT1:

Well it's been a while, and this got sidetracked, but this issue is back. I looked into upgrading from jdbc driver v 1.2 to 2.0, but we are stuck on jdk 1.4, and v 2.0 require jdk 1.5 so that's a non starter. Now I'm looking at my connection string properties. I see 2 that might be useful.

SelectMethod=cursor|direct
responseBuffering=adaptive|full

Currently, with the latency issue, I am running with cursor as the selectMethod, and with the default for responseBuffering which is full. Is changing these properties likely to help? if so, what would be the ideal settings? I'm thinking, based on what I can find online, that using a direct select method and adaptive response buffering might solve my issue. any thoughts?

EDIT2:

WEll I ended changing both of these connection string params, using the default select method(direct) and specifying the responseBuffering as adaptive. This ends up working best for me and alleviates the latency issues I was seeing. thanks for all the help.

Answer 1

I had similar problem, with a very simple request (SELECT . FROM . WHERE = .) taking up to 10 seconds to return a single row when using a jdbc connection in Java, while taking only 0.01s in sqlshell. The problem was the same whether i was using the official MS SQL driver or the JTDS driver.

The solution was to setup this property in the jdbc url : sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false

Full example if you are using MS SQL official driver : jdbc:sqlserver://yourserver;instanceName=yourInstance;databaseName=yourDBName;sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false;

Instructions if using different jdbc drivers and more detailled infos about the problem here : http://emransharif.blogspot.fr/2011/07/performance-issues-with-jdbc-drivers.html

SQL Server differentiates its data types that support Unicode from the ones that just support ASCII. For example, the character data types that support Unicode are nchar, nvarchar, longnvarchar where as their ASCII counter parts are char, varchar and longvarchar respectively. By default, all Microsoft’s JDBC drivers send the strings in Unicode format to the SQL Server, irrespective of whether the datatype of the corresponding column defined in the SQL Server supports Unicode or not. In the case where the data types of the columns support Unicode, everything is smooth. But, in cases where the data types of the columns do not support Unicode, serious performance issues arise especially during data fetches. SQL Server tries to convert non-unicode datatypes in the table to unicode datatypes before doing the comparison. Moreover, if an index exists on the non-unicode column, it will be ignored. This would ultimately lead to a whole table scan during data fetch, thereby slowing down the search queries drastically.

In my case, i had 30M+ records in the table i was searching from. The duration to complete the request went from more than 10 seconds, to approximatively 0.01s after applying the property.

Hope this will help someone !