Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

6.3. Summary

This chapter covered a lot of ground that might not be a core skill for the SQL Server Professional but plays a very important part in SQL Server's performance. These topics need to be understood and taken into consideration at both the design stage and when supporting a live system.

The chapter centered on the three key server resources: Memory, I/O, and CPU, and covered design choices and configuration best practices for each area.

For memory, we covered architecture and discussed the configuration options for large memory support: /3GB, /PAE, and AWE. We talked about how to decide which options to use and gave prescriptive guidance to use as a baseline.

For I/O, we briefly covered network versus disk I/O and discussed types of hard disks, SAN and DAS solutions, storage configuration best practices, and SQL Server file placement.

For CPU, we discussed 32-bit versus 64-bit, multi-core, Hyper-Threading, CPU cache, and NUMA versus SMP to help you understand how to make an informed decision when purchasing a processor or computer architecture.

In the next chapter we will look at tuning the database schema to make more efficient use of server resources to help avoid bottlenecks.