Get a Head Start on SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning Techniques

Performance tuning is my favorite SQL Server topic. I like doing it, and I like writing about it. If you want to increase your SQL Server 2005 performance-tuning skills, a great resource is Microsoft’s "Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2005."

I guess something isn’t “news” if it’s been around for about seven months. But the last time I counted, I found more than a gazillion interesting and helpful documents on the topic of performance tuning. Of course, you can’t read a gazillion documents, and it’s hard to know which ones fall into the “maybe when I have some free time” category versus the “I can’t believe I haven’t read it yet” category--especially when far too many sources on performance tuning fall into the “maybe when I have time” category. Microsoft engineers and members of the SQL Server product team who have real-world experience tuning SQL Server 2005 wrote this white paper. Learn, understand, and apply the techniques discussed in this white paper and you will significantly improve the performance of your SQL Server 2005 systems. The white paper covers a range of performance-diagnostic topics including resource, CPU, memory, and I/O bottlenecks; tempdb; and slow-running queries.

Perhaps my favorite item in the white paper is the discussion of Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) in SQL Server 2005. DMVs let you quickly find important diagnostic information that, before the release of DMVs, was difficult to locate or not available. Alas, because DMVs are so new, it's difficult to find a single, comprehensive source of DMV information. Of the resources I've seen, the "Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2005" white paper does the best job of discussing practical tuning- and optimization-related DMV’s.

In the next few months, you can check out my monthly SQL Server Savvy column in SQL Server Magazine for further DMV discussions. But in the meantime, reading "Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2005" will give you a head start on some of the most interesting and useful SQL Server 2005 performance-tuning information available now.