Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

14.5. Communicating Performance Issues

Users and managers want to know why you can't be more proactive with communication performance issues. It is one thing to communicate that you have some blocking issues or some expensive I/O queries in the database. It is another thing to be able to describe who and what is being impacted. If you use these benchmark tables and insert the information, you can make the connection between the database objects and the use cases, roles, or personas that use those objects. This is the difference between reporting that you've got an abnormal blocking issue with the tables Sales.SalesOrderHeader and Sales.SalesOrderDetail and reporting that the two use cases for "Entering a Sales Order" and "Approving a Sales Order" are going to be affected.

If you were following along with the sample tables and created your lists of use cases, classified your tables by types, and associated your use case to your tables, then you are in great shape to put this information into a data structure. A data structure like the one shown in Figure 14-6 can be used to build some meaningful queries. This information becomes even more meaningful when combined with real data extracted and stored periodically from the DMVs.

Figure 14-6. Figure 14-6

Figure 14-6 shows the traversal path to get from the database objects that are being benchmarked back to the use cases that are ...