if you

select * from MillionBillionRowTable

That takes a lot of time.

period.

you are returning a ton of data, and that requires resources.

the only way to speed that up is with hardware.(RAM, SSD's, Gigabit+ NIC.etc)

you can help a little, by only selecting real data you need, to reduce the amount of data(but not the # of rows) like this:

SELECT id,email from MillionBillionRowTable

as a DBA, you can tune things with WHERE statements:

select * from MillionBillionRowTable WHERE email = 'lowell@somedomain.com'

that statement might be really slow, as it would be a table scan unless the column was already indexed.

if i added an index on the email column, it would probably be faster...much faster and use anindex seek.

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