28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic for Performance Tuners, April 21, 2009
This review is from: SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled (Expert's Voice in SQL Server) (Paperback)
My gauge of an amazing book is simple: if I've got a question, and I reach for the book BEFORE I search the web, then it's an amazing book.
Several times in the last two weeks, I reached for this book first.
Query performance tuning is the art of reading a query's execution plan, figuring out why it's not fast, and then determining the most cost-effective way to make it faster. Anybody can throw more indexes in and just hope it speeds up, but as the book illustrates, sometimes that can hurt more than help.
To do a good job, the tuner needs to know about indexing, statistics, execution plans, compilations, blocking, deadlocks, and query design issues that can force a query to perform poorly. Some of this stuff is covered in abstract terms in college classes, but for the most part, all of us - developers, DBAs, sysadmins - are pretty much unprepared to guess what's going on inside the SQL Server engine.
When you first design and deploy an application, that's a great thing: you don't need to know what's going on inside the black box. SQL Server handles a lot of load with the default settings, with pretty much any application design, before things start to creak and groan. I've seen people build amazingly big SQL Server applications without any knowledge of how indexes or execution plans work. When you start to run into performance problems, you need expert help fast - and that's what this book provides.
Regardless of your seniority level, you're going to find this book's price an extremely worthwhile investment. The book's authors, Grant Fritchey and Sajal Dam, strike a great balance between bringing you up to speed versus diving into advanced concepts. Chapter 4 on Index Analysis is a great example. It spends the first few pages bringing the beginners up to speed on what an index is and how B-trees work. Then it gradually layers on an explanation of how you would approach index design and why the width of your index matters. The explanation includes queries that prove the concepts, with screenshots of results where appropriate. The discussion ramps up to more advanced topics like covering indexes, filtered indexes, and compression.
I really like the organization of this book because it progresses in the same way that I'd recommend training for a performance tuner. If you need to make an application run faster, read the book in order. Don't be tempted to jump to, say, execution plan analysis - you'll make poor decisions without understanding the concepts discussed earlier.
I've been performance tuning applications for years, trying to wring every last dollar's worth out of my hardware to make our applications run faster, and I keep learning things as I go through this book. Normally, I try to read the entire book cover to cover before posting a review, but in this case, it's going to be quite a while before I finish the book. I just keep reading a chapter, catching enough things I didn't know before, and then stopping to apply that knowledge and test it out in my lab. I highly recommend it.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled, May 5, 2009
This review is from: SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled (Expert's Voice in SQL Server) (Paperback)
Great book. I've been waiting for the re-write to Sajal Dam's book on SQL Server 2000 performance tuning for a very long time. The only problem with it is that that too many example scripts do not match the code in the book. [case in point: On pg. 289 it references a script called stats_changes.sql. The code in the download is nothing like the code on pg. 290. Ditto for pg. 177 and several others.] This leaves the reader to figure it out for themself. The book includes an email address for the author that rejects all attempts to send him email and I see no updates to the download since it was first published. If these oversites are corrected, this would be a great learning resource for the SQL Server professional charged with performance tuning responsibilities.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great reference book on SQL Tuning., November 23, 2009
This review is from: SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled (Expert's Voice in SQL Server) (Paperback)
One of the finest book on SQL Server Perf Tuning. To be honest I used to have the SQL Server performance tuning book by Ken England on SQL 2000 and looking for it's sequel on 2005. I went to the book store and ordered the book but it was disappointing. Then this book was given to me by one of my friends. A great reference book as I was expecting. Lot of theories and matching examples make this book stand out from the rest. SQL Server is just not SQL Tuning. It includes Database System tuning. This book has given a dedicated chapter in making you understand the same. It gives you a perspective on how to approach to a performance tuning from identification of the performance bottleneck to troubleshooting the problem. I enjoyed reading chapters on indexing and Index, Statistics and Execution Cache Analysis. However, I wanted to see more detail on tuning XML and Service Broker.
I will suggest this book for other DBAs and SQL Programmers who want to know the theories behind Index and Statistics, BLocking and Deadlocking, Fragmentation.
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