Microsoft® SQL Server 2000(TM) Performance Tuning Technical Reference [Hardcover]

Edward Whalen (Author), Marcilina Garcia (Author), Steve Adrien DeLuca (Author), Dean Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Technical Reference | Publication Date: August 3, 2001

Performance tuning a relational database can be engaging yet frustrating, and this guide gives you the practical information you need to configure and tune a Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database for better, faster, more scalable solutions. The authors start with the basics and build upon them to teach the mechanics of performance tuning and how they affect the whole system. This book also shows how to optimize for the underlying operating system and hardware. It’s the only book of its kind coauthored by engineers who have worked in the SQL Server performance group.

Expert instruction helps you understand these topics:

THE BASICS:

• Architectural fundamentals that affect tuning
• I/O tuning and RAID storage considerations
• How to tune hardware, database layout, and configuration parameters
• Feature enhancements for better ease-of-use, performance, manageability, and reliability.

SERVER TUNING:

• How to use the Microsoft Windows® 2000 System Monitor and the SQL Server Profiler to shorten transaction response times.

SIZING AND CAPACITY PLANNING:

• How to model software and hardware usage to predict resource consumption and conduct preconfiguration planning, and how to perform what-if scenarios about workload growth to avoid slow response times.

CONFIGURING AND TUNING:

• How to tune online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, data warehouses, and replicated systems.
• How to set up your system for high-performance backup and recovery.

TUNING SQL STATEMENTS:

• How to get optimal performance by using Query Analyzer and Profiler to tune SQL statements and stored procedures.
• How to take advantage of indexes and hints.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Tuning databases can be fun if built into the predeployment time allocated to building a system. Tuning ceases to be fun when it's undertaken on a production system, overseen by an unhappy customer with crushing time constraints. Unfortunately, the latter scenario tends to be the more common. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning Technical Reference provides database administrators and (to a lesser degree) developers with the information they need to extract maximum performance from Microsoft SQL Server 2000. This book favors optimization of SQL Server that can be done via the administrative interface rather than in application code.

Most of database tuning has to do with sacrificing one aspect of performance (say, disk storage capacity) for the improvement of another (like the execution speed of a particular kind of query). The authors of this book--they're a team of consultants from a Texas company that specializes in database tuning, as well as from Microsoft--take care to explain the tradeoffs involved in various tuning decisions. Choose one option, they say, and performance metric A will improve at the expense of metric B. Having explained the design considerations for various tuning strategies, they walk their readers through how to do the tuning they're talking about. Instructions aren't for the clueless, but they're fully adequate for SQL Server users who know their way around the interface generally. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to make databases served by Microsoft SQL Server 2000 run as fast and as efficiently as possible by tweaking the way it runs. Emphasis is placed on read/write operations (including SQL Server's way of interacting with RAID arrays), performance monitors, and settings for processor, disk, and RAM usage. There's also a lot of information on capacity planning and system sizing.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 450 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (August 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735612706
• ISBN-13: 978-0735612709
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,554,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I started my database career at Compaq Computer Corporation in around 1991. I was working as a SCO Unix kernel developer in the Unix group when I was asked to help with an Oracle benchmark. After working with Oracle I found that Oracle performance was very challenging and interesting. Eventually they started a database performance group and I was part of it. In this role I continued to work with Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server performance on both Unix and Windows. While I was at Compaq I started my writing career.
In 1997 I left Compaq and founded Performance Tuning Corporation (www.perftuning.com). At Performance Tuning Corporation we do database performance, integration and disaster recovery consulting and I continue to write books. I am currently working on the "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Administrator's Companion" which is my 9th book. I continue to enjoy database performance consulting as well as being at home with my wife and playing with our Border Collies. I enjoy being able to work with customers and I am constantly learning new things about Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Look elsewhere, May 17, 2004

By 

Mr. Jan Tari "anomalocarus" (london) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Microsoft® SQL Server 2000(TM) Performance Tuning Technical Reference (Hardcover)

I bought this book on the basis of the glowing recommendations here. As I have a number of servers to tune which execute some extremely complex SQL, and I need to be able to look inside with Perfmon and the profiler, I thought this book would be very useful. I particularly wanted help with sysmon.
This book gave me virtually nothing. Its coverage of tuning was shallow, information was repeated unnecessarily, text was copied almost verbatim from BOL, and it provided little or nothing that couldn't be found elsewhere and easily.
It tries to cover everything at the cost of giving real value. For example it provides 15 pages on data warehousing of which 12 are a description of data warehousing so cursory that if you don't know the subject you'll only be confused, and 3 pages on actual tuning which basically say that you should find out whether the bottleneck is CPU/disk/memory then add more CPU/disk/memory respectively.
Sizing and capacity planning are introduced with seven equations without justification. Okay, but completions C is given as the number of transactions that were completed during the observation period, but on the facing page C = 96 seconds [sic]. Did anyone proof-read this? With these and numerous other oddities (trunc. log on chkpt on SQL2000?) I don't know what I can trust.
The mathematics for this section is done and finished in 6 pages.
I was particularly looking for a comprehensive description of sysmon counters. Other than a quick rundown of the obvious ones there's a long list in the appendix of others, including such gems as "lock blocks allocated: the total number of allocated lock blocks". The whole point of buying this book was to find out how to use them, or indeed what they mean (Skipped Ghosted Records/Sec - means what?); merely giving me a list of them is redundant. This was the biggest letdown for me - I need this info!
There are other important omissions. I have spent literally weeks identifying and working round failures in the query plan optimiser. This serious issue is not properly addressed except for a chapter introducing query hints. A taxonomy of optimiser failures and ways of tackling each type might save others from the headaches I've had. Optimiser hints do not always suffice.
The book is rated on the back for user levels IT Implementer and Corporate Developer. That is far too generous.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Performance, Performance, Performance, November 5, 2002

By 

Rishon Industries "Lou G" (Forest Hills, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Microsoft® SQL Server 2000(TM) Performance Tuning Technical Reference (Hardcover)

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.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Introduction to performance tuning, September 7, 2004

By 

Ww Leenen (Amsterdam) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Microsoft® SQL Server 2000(TM) Performance Tuning Technical Reference (Hardcover)

The `SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning' provides the reader with an extensive overview of the functionality that MSS2000 has for performance tuning. This book has been written by the manufacturer of MS2000, and has therefore some specific properties a reader has to taken into account. One of them is that every single tuning-feature is mentioned, although their relative impact (hence importance) on performance is not discussed. Another one is the white-book nature of the information presented; very general advice for the entrylevel DBA. For example: in the chapter `Hi-performance Backup and recovery' (it has only 18 pages) is says: "plan full backups for off hours", " use differential backups", "use multiple data files" etc.

This book has the title `Technical Reference' and should be regarded as such. The DBA, working in a company which doesn't consider performance-tuning important enough to dedicate a policy to, who is confronted with a sudden structural diminishing of performance and is to find out where this bottleneck stems from will not benefit from this book. For example, the book dedicates a mere two pages on "interpreting Graphical Execution Plans" and gives only 1 example. For a useful checklist on where to look first when confronted with the so-called `query from hell' one should read other books. But for the novice in tuning, the one who is unfamiliar to concepts like locks, RAID, system monitor, I/O,page vs rowlevel, differential backups, how to log in on queryanalyzer, index tuning wizard, etc this book can serve as an introduction. But once past this introduction, this book has served it's purpose.