• Congratulations on your first article. Nice work.

    For the future, a few suggestions that might help. Doing a how-to article like this is great. But you also need to include guidance for when and where you can run these tools. For example, you show how to tune a query or a workload, but in neither do you suggest that this could cause considerable load on a production system and maybe shouldn't be run there. You should also address the shortcomings of the tool. Many people who use the DTA find few helpful suggestions.

    Just a couple of things to think about for next time. Other than that, great job. Keep it up.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning