Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Database Engine Tuning Advisor

The Database Engine Tuning Advisor (DTA) has been a decent supplement for helping with SQL Server performance. It is not the hottest offering from Microsoft, but it can be valuable in enforcing some basic design options in regard to partitioning, indexing, and basic table structures. You can use either the GUI version of the DTA or the batch command-line version to achieve the same results. With DTA, you can run an analysis against an entire database or just focus on as little as one table within a database. Say that you have one problem child table that is at the heart of all your misery. In this case, you would probably just want to tune that one table for optimal database access.

To tune and analyze anything, ...