Chapter 6: Indexing and Performance

Maintaining and troubleshooting Microsoft SQL Server's performance entails a very wide set of tasks that depend on several factors, all of which are handled by administrators and developers, sometimes independently and sometimes in conjunction. There's a strong need for the cooperation of these two roles when working with SQL Server, which is why even if this book is taking SQL Server topics from an administrator's point of view, we will go through some development tips and tricks briefly to show some cases of performance lag.

In this chapter, we will understand what performance is and enumerate the prerequisites required for successful monitoring and tuning. We will also provide a top-level overview of monitoring procedures. We will learn how use the tools required, as well as how to read and interpret results measured by the tools. For developers, we will look at the usage of different kinds of indexes and how they work. From...