Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

Chapter 15. Successful Deployment Strategies

The application life cycle goes through a series of very important steps before the actual deployment. Just like any other application, the database platform is also expected to be reliable and agile. A lot of deployments fail due to a lack of sufficient planning and performance testing during the earlier stages. This chapter aims to provide some guidelines and best practices to follow for a successful deployment of your application databases.

Your production system can be compared to a supply chain process. The world of supply chains consists of incoming orders that are fulfilled by servers (machines, humans, and so on). The servers source various components that are then assembled together to make the final product. These products are then stored in inventory to be shipped out to customers. The capacity of a supply chain environment is determined by the capacity of the slowest process within the supply chain. A process that restricts a supply chain from achieving maximum throughput is known as a bottleneck. A bottleneck may arise due to multiple factors such as machine breakdowns, lack of resources, or simply poor planning.

Similarly, a typical production scenario consists of users that request information from the application or database through the use of queries or transactions. These transactions are then processed by the various servers (computers) after having assimilated the information from various sources such as cache, memory, ...