Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

Chapter 1. Performance Tuning

SQL Server 2005 works great right out of the box. For most SQL Server users, performance is never an issue. They install SQL Server, load up their data, and the system works just great. Over the past few years, however, there has been an explosion in database size and in the hardware performance that is available to small and medium-sized businesses. This has allowed many more users to build larger and larger systems. Many of today's systems are now larger than yesterday's enterprise class systems that required mainframe class hardware. This explosion in size and performance is pushing more users against the limits of the out-of-the-box performance of SQL Server. This means that more and more SQL Server users are having to start learning about a side of SQL Server that they never needed to know about — performance tuning.

The good news is that as with the out-of-the-box experience, the SQL Server team has spent a lot of time working on making SQL Server an easy database system to performance tune. Unlike many of SQL Server's competitors, where you need many highly trained and very expensive consultants to diagnose and finetune performance problems, SQL Server has the tools and information available so that just about anyone can jump in and start tuning their databases.