Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

Chapter 14. Performance Tuning T-SQL

Performance tuning T-SQL is very interesting, but also quite frequently frustrating. It is interesting because there is so much involved in tuning that a knowledge of the product's architecture and internals plays a very large role in doing it well. Of course, knowledge alone is not sufficient without the right tools, which you will learn about in this chapter. If you have tuned a query and reduced its runtime, you may have jumped up and down with excitement, but sometimes you cannot achieve that result even after losing sleep for many nights. In this chapter you will learn how to gather the data for query tuning, the tools for query tuning, the stages a query goes through before execution, and how to analyze the execution plan. It is very important to understand which stages a query passes through before actually being executed by the execution engine, so we'll start with physical query processing.