Query Takes more time in SQL Server 2008 I have a table in SQL Server 2008 with 553,386 rows and every day it is increasing by about 400 rows. Now when I full scan of the table (Select * from) it is taking 23 sec. Is there any solution to speed up the query? 

My PC configuration is, CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, RAM: 4GB, OS: Windows 7 32 bit

Thanks in advance!

Table structure is given below:

USE [dbCPFL_Test]
GO

/****** Object:  Table [dbo].[PriceData]    Script Date: 10/04/2013 19:56:10 ******/
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO

SET ANSI_PADDING ON
GO

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[PriceData](
    [TradeDate] [date] NOT NULL,
    [Ticker] [varchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [ClsPRC] [float] NOT NULL,
    [No_of_Share] [float] NOT NULL,
    [TradeStatus] [char](1) NOT NULL,
    [Adj_MKTCap] [float] NOT NULL,
    [deList] [char](1) NOT NULL,
 CONSTRAINT [PK_PriceData] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED 
(
    [TradeDate] ASC,
    [Ticker] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX  = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE  = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS  = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS  = ON) ON [PRIMARY]
) ON [PRIMARY]

GO

SET ANSI_PADDING OFF
GO
Sure; upgrade your hardware.  Note that rendering results in Management Studio is notoriously slow, so keep that in mind if that is your performance benchmark tool.  However ...

The big question I have is: why do you care?  I'm hard pressed to come up with a legitimate reason to return the entire 550k record set.  You're not going to display that much on any screen in an application.  No one would ever view it.  If you're returning it for post-processing an aggregation or something of the sort, you should be aggregating it in SQL, then returning it.  If you are dumping it in an ETL process, long queries basically come with the territory (unless you're clever and come up with an incremental Extraction).