Making Sense of your SQL Server Application’s Performance – A Practical Guide

Performance tuning on SQL Server is difficult. Sifting through the huge volume of tuning information available on various web sites - which counters to look at, which queries to run, etc. – can overwhelming. Part of the challenge is just to figure out where to start.

One very important area that is often overlooked is to understand how the SQL that is executed on the server affects performance and how to use that understanding to tune performance more effectively. 

This paper explores a number of key points that you can take away and apply to your own environment: 

• Getting a picture of how your application behaves is key to performance tuning that application
• How to follow the performance optimization plan
  • Optimize application demand
  • Minimize logical I/O
  • Optimize physical I/O
• Leverage the new features in SQL Server 2005 to your advantage (XPath, DMVs)