In the first post of this series, I explained the bin-packing problem and established a baseline solution. The second post investigated ways to increase the packing efficiency. In none of these posts did I pay particular attention to performance – and frankly, it shows. Performance of all solutions presented thus far sucks eggs. Time to see what ...

In my previous post, I explained the bin packing problem, explained an example scenario, and established a baseline for both speed and efficiency of bin packing algorithms by writing a rather crude cursor-based procedure. In this part, I will look at some small modifications that can be made to this code to make it better at packing bins as full ...

Some problems can only be solved by brute-forcing every possible combination. The problem with such an approach, is that execution time grows exponentially as the amount of input data grows – so that even on the best possible hardware, you will get inacceptable performance once the input data goes beyond the size of a small test set. These ...

After making my post on cursor optimization I received some comments that triggered me to do some further investigation. Adam Machanic wrote in my blog’s comments that using SQLCLR to loop over a SqlDataReader would be much faster than any T-SQL based cursor. And Erland Sommarskog wrote in a usenet thread that he has some colleagues who think that ...

The best way to optimize performance of a cursor is, of course, to rip it out and replace it with set-based logic. But there is still a small category of problems where a cursor will outperform a set-based solution. The introduction of ranking functions in SQL Server 2005 has taken a large chunk out of that category – but some remain. For those ...