Lovely Heap and poor CPU

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s assume you’re dealing with a legacy application where most of the logic lives in stored procedures, functions, triggers, and so on.

The app uses a queue implemented on top of SQL Server - not unusual for legacy applications. The interesting part is that the table behind the queue is a Heap with no nonclustered indexes. Let’s call this table Lovely Heap.

The application has hundreds of thousands of tables, and each one has a trigger that inserts one or more rows into Lovely Heap. Okay, okay, not hundreds of thousands - just hundreds. But you get the idea of how everything was built.

Database Internals on Ilya Baybikov's home page

Lovely Heap and poor CPU