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

Introduction


An execution plan is one of the most important feature shipped with SQL Server since long. This feature is not only for DBA or SQL developer, but this is useful for everybody who is dealing with T-SQL (Transact-SQL) in any capacity.

An execution plan guides you to understand what has happened with the query, which was getting executed, with the help of estimated execution plan/actual execution plan. It helps you to identify how your JOIN statements are behaving, whether Index is being used or not, what was the estimation of query optimizer for your query, what are the actual costs taken by the query executed, and much more such as data flow, sampling of rows, reads, writes, logical I/O, physical constraints of query, operators.

Note

When we see questions related to slow query performance, in any technical forum about SQL Server; we used to ask, Can you please provide us with the execution plan of the query? This is the best way to get an insight about the path taken by optimizer...