Learn how to add those indexes you need in part 3 of Matt Perdeck's 8 part series on improving data access. This is based on the book ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets.  Read more...

Are Common Language Runtime routines in SQL Server faster or slower than the equivalent T-SQL code? How would you go about testing the relative performance objectively? Solomon Rutzky creates a test framework to try to answer the question and comes up with some surprising results that you can check for yourself.  Read more...

Capturing performance monitor counters is of great value to understand how SQL Server is behaving at a macro level, that being how overall resources are being used within the engine. Without this data it is difficult to determine where the performance issues are occurring. Capturing the metrics has been traditionally from Performance Monitor either on an ad-hoc basis or setting up a log to capture the values on a predefined basis.  Read more...

Part 2 of a series from Matt Perdeck on speeding up your database access. This is a great series for developers. This is based on the book ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets.  Read more...

In the first part of this series, learn how to pinpoint missing indexes in your databases.  Read more...

This artcle attempts to differentiate between the uses of WITH RECOMPILE and OPTION (RECOMPILE) features.  Read more...

Learn to use SQLCLR, parallelism and how to write better performing SQL code from MVP Adam Machanic in New York City on July 14-15. Early bird discounts available with the code "EARLYBIRD".  Read more...

Learn to use SQLCLR, parallelism and how to write better performing SQL code from MVP Adam Machanic in New York City on July 14-15. Early bird discounts available with the code "EARLYBIRD".  Read more...

SQL 2008 has some key improvements over SQL 2005. This article deals with backup compression and faster backups in SQL 2008  Read more...

Should we really avoid cursors? See how to rewrite code to avoid cursors and also analyze the implications.   Read more...

Learn to use SQLCLR, parallelism and how to write better performing SQL code from MVP Adam Machanic in New York City on July 14-15. Early bird discounts available with the code "EARLYBIRD".  Read more...

Greg Larsen lists his top 10 SQL Server counters for maintaining database performance.   Read more...

In the second part of the Resource Monitor series we conclude with a look using the Memory tab and Disk tab to diagnose performance issues.  Read more...

Windows Resource Monitor can be a very useful tool for initial diagnosis of performance issues. In this two part series we look at how to troubleshoot performance issues using Resource Monitor.  Read more...

In part 2 of our best practices clinic, Brad McGehee looks at a couple of the items that were misconfigured on the SQLServerCentral database instances.  Read more...

An interesting mystery on why some nHibernate performance issues might exist on your systems. Read this piece from SQL Server expert David Poole and look to see if this is a problem you can easily solve in your environment.  Read more...

This is the second part of a leadership series I started with On Leadership - Lead from the Front. To recap...  Read more...

This article describes a real-world example of performance tuning index maintenance for a large table of approximately 1 billion rows.   Read more...

SSRS provides a very user friendly way to author and deploy reports. These reports can be accessed from different platforms where the reports are deployed - reports manager, SharePoint, stand-alone / distributed applications or programmatically using SSRS SOAP endpoints. Unfortunately, SSRS / BIDS does not provide any high-end debugging tools such as SQL Profiler for analyzing the performance of SSRS reports. In this tip we will look at different ways of debugging and analyzing SSRS reports performance using execution logs and freeware tools.  Read more...

We experience regular slowdowns on our MS SQL database. After analyzing the memory usage we would like to continue the root cause investigation by examining CPU bottlenecks. What is your recommendation to recognize CPU related bottlenecks in SQL Server?  Read more...