Book Image

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning Cookbook

Book Image

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning Cookbook

Overview of this book

As a DBA you must have encountered a slow running application on SQL Server, but there are various factors that could be affecting the performance. If you find yourself in this situation, don't wait, pick up this book and start working towards improving performance of your SQL Server 2012. SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning Cookbook is divided into three major parts -- Performance Monitoring, Performance Tuning, and Performance Management--that are mandatory to deal with performance in any capacity. SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning Cookbook offers a great way to manage performance with effective, concise, and practical recipes. You will learn how to diagnose performance issues, fix them, and take precaution to avoid common mistakes. Each recipe given in this book is an individual task that will address different performance aspects to take your SQL Server's Performance to a higher level.The first part of this book covers Monitoring with SQL Server Profiler, DTA, System statistical function, SPs with DBCC commands, Resource Monitor & Reliability, and Performance Monitor and Execution Plan. The second part of the book offers Execution Plan, Dynamic Management Views, and Dynamic Management Functions, SQL Server Cache and Stored Procedure Recompilations, Indexes, Important ways to write effective TSQL, Statistics, Table and Index Partitioning, Advanced Query tuning with Query Hints and Plan Guide, Dealing with Locking, Blocking and Deadlocking and Configuring SQL Server for optimization to boost performance.The third and final part gives you knowledge of performance management with help of Policy Based Management and Management with Resource Governor.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Increasing performance by including columns in an index


The concept of included columns in indexes was introduced in SQL Server 2005 and is also available in SQL Server 2008 and 2012. We can include non-key columns in a non-clustered index, as they are not counted in its index size.

There is a limitation wherein the maximum number of columns allowed is 16 and the maximum size of the index key column allowed is 900 bytes, so it is not a good idea to have an index with many unnecessary or non-key columns.

Only include the key column in the Index part, and to avoid the lookup of a non-key column, keep another non-key column in the INCLUDE part of a non-clustered Index. This is because any column given in the INCLUDE part of a non-clustered index doesn't fall under the limitations discussed previously.

Getting ready

In the Increasing performance by a covering index section, we had an OrderId column as a part of the main non-clustered index. However, OrderID is not the key column, as we have not...