Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

Chapter 14. Best Practices for Designing for Performance from the Start

Not many architects start software projects to create applications to sit on shelves unused, but that can be the reality if the product doesn't meet user expectations. If performance is required in an application, you should approach the project with performance in mind from the start. Too often, the DBA resources are brought in at the end of the design, or worse, at the end of the development process to figure out how to speed things up. To prepare for database-level performance issues, you absolutely have to understand how the application works and how the database resources are going to be used. In new agile development processes, we see database designers and developers being added to development teams. This is a good thing. If you are a developer, add SQL Server performance skills to your toolset. It takes these two skill sets together to implement successful, high-performance projects.

Performance problems are usually caused by contention for common resources. Disk heads can only move to so many places at one time. Only so many pages and procedures can be cached in one moment. The more information you have about the system, the better performance tuning decisions you'll be able to make. This chapter is designed for the DBA who is pulled into a development project before or perhaps after the physical model has already been formalized. Yet it's still early enough for the DBA to have a hand in troubleshooting ...