Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

Chapter 6. Choosing and Configuring Hardware

The previous chapters have focused on how to monitor and troubleshoot a SQL Server system. From this chapter forward you'll look at what you can do to resolve the bottlenecks and tune any performance problems. Your SQL Server system may consist of multiple servers hosting multiple applications or just a single server running everything. Either way, there are lots of moving parts, each of which must work together efficiently to provide the highest level of performance. If you think of each resource as a link in a chain, the weakest link really can weaken or even break the chain.

This chapter covers selecting and configuring the environment that SQL Server runs in; namely Windows and the server hardware itself. You will also learn how you should proactively design your environment using best practices to avoid performance problems later on.

First you'll look at which resources can become a bottleneck and what can be the cause. It is important to know where your system's weaknesses are likely to occur so you can proactively monitor the resources using what you've learned in Chapters 2 and 3. Read the first section of this chapter to understand the scope of what you're going to tune.

You will then look at what you need to consider to make the correct server configuration choices and how your choice can impact SQL Server performance. Taking into account the requirements of all the applications running on the infrastructure is absolutely ...