Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

What’s New in SQL Server Database Engine Tuning Advisor

One of the most useful features added for SQL Server 2012 is the ability to use SQL Server’s query plan cache as the source of the workload you want to use as the basis of tuning. This is really useful because you have a great mix of queries that have been hitting the database that represent the typical variety of queries you want to optimize on and that you want to leverage for all around tuning results. There is also an ability to utilize production metadata, statistics, and hardware information to help tune your database but still be executing on a test server. (This feature is only available via the command line DTA utility, though.) This allows you to get tuning recommendations that ...