SQL Server Query Performance Tuning,Fourth Edition

Introduction

After all the years of work on SQL Server by Microsoft and all the work put in by talented data professionals, you’d think that fundamental performance problems would be a thing of the past, but they’re not. Performance is frequently one of the last things on people’s minds when they’re developing a system. Unfortunately, that means it usually becomes the biggest problem after that system goes to production. You can’t simply rely on getting a phone call that tells you that procedure X on database Y that runs on server Z is running slow. You need to have mechanisms in place to find this information for yourself. You also can’t work off the general word slow. Slow compared to what? Last week? Last month? The way it ran in your development ...