SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled (Expert's Voice in SQL Server)

SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled presents a direct trouble–shooting methodology for identifying poorly-performing stored procedures and queries, isolating the causes of that poor performance, and fixing the underlying problems. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the top causes of poorly performing queries and shows methods for identifying and dealing with the problems in that chapter’s domain. Emphasis is always put upon or placed upon practical methods that you can put to immediate use in your day–to–day work. SQL Server 2008 functionality, tips, and tricks are emphasized in each subject area.

Emphasizes the practical. Does not bury readers in theory.
Gives readers practical techniques to immediately apply in their daily work.
Dedicates a chapter to each of the most common, performance–related problem areas.

What you’ll learn

Identify and fix poorly performing queries that are hurting your business.
Read query execution plans and identify bottlenecks in performance.
Record system performance metrics for trend analysis.
Learn to design databases and write Transact–SQL code to avoid common problems.
Understand what an index is, what it does, and how to build one.
Use industry accepted best practices and understand how to develop your own to arrive at optimal database performance.

Who this book is for

SQL Server Query Performance Tuning Distilled is aimed at anyone writing business–critical Transact–SQL queries, and also at those responsible for the continued good performance of those queries. Developers, database administrators, business intelligence analysts, and any others who develop Transact–SQL queries will find this book an indispensable resource for getting the most out of what SQL Server 2008 has to offer.

Customer Reviews:

Fantastic for Performance Tuners

By Brent Ozar - April 21, 2009

My gauge of an amazing book is simple: if I've got a question, and I reach for the book BEFORE I search the web, then it's an amazing book.

Several times in the last two weeks, I reached for this book first.

Query performance tuning is the art of reading a query's execution plan, figuring out why it's not fast, and then determining the most cost-effective way to make it faster. Anybody can throw more indexes in and just hope it speeds up, but as the book illustrates, sometimes that can hurt more than help.

To do a good job, the tuner needs to know about indexing, statistics, execution plans, compilations, blocking, deadlocks, and query design issues that can force a query to perform poorly. Some of this stuff is covered in abstract terms in college classes, but for the most part, all of us - developers, DBAs, sysadmins - are pretty much unprepared to guess what's going on inside the SQL Server engine.

When you first design and deploy an... read more

SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled

By -tg "-tg" - May 5, 2009

Great book. I've been waiting for the re-write to Sajal Dam's book on SQL Server 2000 performance tuning for a very long time. The only problem with it is that that too many example scripts do not match the code in the book. [case in point: On pg. 289 it references a script called stats_changes.sql. The code in the download is nothing like the code on pg. 290. Ditto for pg. 177 and several others.] This leaves the reader to figure it out for themself. The book includes an email address for the author that rejects all attempts to send him email and I see no updates to the download since it was first published. If these oversites are corrected, this would be a great learning resource for the SQL Server professional charged with performance tuning responsibilities.

A great reference book on SQL Tuning.

By Sudheer K. Maharana - November 23, 2009

One of the finest book on SQL Server Perf Tuning. To be honest I used to have the SQL Server performance tuning book by Ken England on SQL 2000 and looking for it's sequel on 2005. I went to the book store and ordered the book but it was disappointing. Then this book was given to me by one of my friends. A great reference book as I was expecting. Lot of theories and matching examples make this book stand out from the rest. SQL Server is just not SQL Tuning. It includes Database System tuning. This book has given a dedicated chapter in making you understand the same. It gives you a perspective on how to approach to a performance tuning from identification of the performance bottleneck to troubleshooting the problem. I enjoyed reading chapters on indexing and Index, Statistics and Execution Cache Analysis. However, I wanted to see more detail on tuning XML and Service Broker.

I will suggest this book for other DBAs and SQL Programmers who want to know the theories behind... read more