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Parallel Insertion

Published 2016-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Sanjay Mishra and Arvind Shyamsundar show that you can use parallelism with the INSERT INTO [Table] SELECT [Values] construct:

Two important criteria must be met to allow parallel execution of an INSERT … SELECT statement.

  1. The database compatibility level must be 130. Execute “SELECT name, compatibility_level FROM sys.databases” to determine the compability level of your database, and if it is not 130, execute “ALTER DATABASE <MyDB> SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL = 130” to set it to 130. Changing the compatibility level of a database influences some behavior changes. You should test and ensure that your overall application works well with the new compatibility level.

  2. Must use the TABLOCK hint with the INSERT … SELECT statement. For example: INSERT INTO table_1 WITH (TABLOCK) SELECT * FROM table_2.

This is a limited use case, but it does sound very useful for large staging table loads or backfills when you can control table access.

Published in Performance Tuning