Performance Monitoring and Server Tuning

Diagnosing instance performance through waits, resources, monitoring, and baselines.

405 associated posts180 primary posts

Recommended Books for SQL Server DBAs and Developers

Here's my favorite SQL Server books for 2016-2014:

T-SQL Fundamentals - (updated for SQL 2016) - don't be fooled by this "fundamentals" title, because everybody who writes T-SQL queries needs this book. It's the manual we should have been given when we started, and everyone's going to learn something about concurrency, performance, and updates here.

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SQL Server 2005 Setup Checklist Part 2: After The Install

I've covered what needs to happen before you install SQL Server - now, let's talk about what to do immediately after the setup finishes.
Install not just the service packs, but also the cumulative updates.
Starting with SQL Server 2005's Service Pack 2, Microsoft releases hotfixes in cumulative packs. These updates do more than just fix bugs: they improve how SQL Server performs. These updates are free performance benefits - and who doesn't like that?

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SQL Server Perfmon (Performance Monitor) Best Practices

Database administrators need to know each SQL Server's weakest link so we know where to focus their hardware budgets and time. On any given server, we need to know what the slowest component is, and where it'll pay off to invest hours and dollars. This is performance tuning, and the first place to start is by using Performance Monitor.

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Database & Network Administrators are really Customer Administrators

The first thing administrators want to monitor is their resources: file servers, database servers, app servers, etc. That's understandable, since they're system administrators. In order to be really successful with monitoring, though, we need to think like customer administrators - for both our internal and external customers. Forget the hardware, and think about the people. How do our customers interact with our systems?

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