Microsofta SQL Server 2000a[ Performance Tuning Technical Reference

Considering the difficulty of the topic, this book is a fairly easy read. The single best thing about the book is that the advice is actionable. You can read this book and immediately begin tuning.Coverage is excellent - performance tuning, capacity planning, setting up disk drives, managing cpu, I/O, network, and memory, index tuning, backups, replication, OLTP versus OLAP, etc.For each subject area, the authors explain the applicable concepts and SQL Server tools, and then systematically explain their application using practical examples.Compared to other performance tuning books, it is an 80/20 book. By this I mean that the authors focus on what is most important and then move on to the next topic. They don't get carried away demonstrating how much they know about each concept or go into the minutia of the options of each SQL Server tool.I hope they write more books.

Strong recommendations from others brought me to this book and I feel obliged to give back.This is a masterpiece.Well researched and well writtenI Got a hold of a couple of concepts missed in other books because of the lucidity of the examples and explanations.Great book If you read it you will understand why....Michael Tubuo Ngong

Performance is a responsible and important job. Although you might be doing mostlt reactive tuning, tuning is still what you need and the more tricks you have , the better chance you have to not be beaten .This book supplies bunch of good stuff to get started.

I tell my clients and users that the two most important services that a DBA provides are security and performance, but not necessarily in that order. If you are a professional SQL Server DBA or a DBA wannabe, performance has to be one of your top skills. This book, by Edward Whalen, gives you the information that you will need to accomplish the very important task of planning a new SQL Server installation. There is a lot of very useful discussion that relate the physical hardware parameters of the server to the expected performance that users will experience. This discussion includes a comprehensive survey of how the I/O subsytem contributes to the overall server performance. There are also two chapters on sizing and capacity planning, with carefully worked-through examples detailing how to size memory and how to determine appropriate disk and processor configurations for a new installation.Of course, the other major task in the performance arena is troubleshooting. Although Whalen's book doesn't present a performance troubleshooting checklist, the major theme of this book centers on recognizing and remediating performance problems. In many cases, the book also discusses the origins of the preformance problems. By the time you internalize this book, you'll be able write your own troubleshooting checklist.In my opinion, the two best aspects of this book are:a) Unlike some other "Performance" books that I have read, this book focuses on performance and not a million other things. It discusses performance, not DTS, not Security, not Internet, etc. It just talks about performance.b) With the Acknowledgments section thanking Bill Gates twice, and this book being written by Microsoft insiders, I would have expected lots of hype. Pleasantly suprising, but true, this book has no hype. Just plain facts about performance. Good show.I did have one small disappointment with this book, though - I was hoping to get more insight into the use of the Query Analyzer execution plan tools. The fact is that Whalen's discussion of this facility is probably the best information that's out there, but it still falls short. If the authors write another edition, we would all benefit if they could work up some detailed examples that explain the various aspects of the execution plan tools. It would be super if they would provide samples that we could download.

As both a professional database consultant and DBA, I must agree that this is hands down the best overall tuning book for SQL Server 2000. It covers the gamut from hardware planning and sizing/tuning to database performance tuning. Easy to read and quite useful! Great job Microsoft Press another winner. Get it and become a tuning god.