Thomas LaRock: "Without a basic understanding of wait events and how the occur, you will waste a lot of time trying and guessing at how to improve the performance of a query." Optimizing SQL Server ...

SQL Server performance tuning is a complex topic due to how layered it is. While performance problems can often be traced back to data storage issues, the performance tuning process is a "holistic ...

Indexes typically improve performance, however if all the columns required by a query are not on the index, some data is obtained from the underlying table via a key lookup. When a ‘large’ amount of ...

The well-known SQL Server Profiler/Trace tool has been deprecated, and replaced with a lightweight Extended Events (XEs) tool. This chapter provides a step-by-step walkthrough on setting up an XE ...

Database professionals agree – SQL Server performance tuning is hard. And on top of that, it never stops because complex database environments are always changing with upgrades, application updates ...

This paper demystifies query tuning by providing a rigorous 12-step process that database professionals at any level can use to systematically assess and adjust query performance, starting from the ...

As Joey explains, Activity Monitor consumes a lot of resources and yields little usable data. Here are some third-party alternatives. I get to work with a lot of customers, so I get to see a lot of ...