CHAPTER  3

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Hidden Performance Gotchas

By Gail Shaw

Performance tuning is often considered to be one of those dark arts of Microsoft SQL Server, full of secrets and mysteries that few comprehend. Most of performance tuning, however, is about knowing how SQL Server works and working with it, not against it.

To that end, I want to look at some not-so-obvious causes of performance degradation: predicates, residuals, and spills. In this chapter, I’ll show you how to identify them and how to resolve them.

Predicates

The formal definition of a predicate (in the database sense) is “a term designating a property or relation,” or in English, a comparison ...

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