Sql Server

Performance tuning is not easy and there aren’t any silver bullets, but you can go a surprisingly long way with a few basic guidelines.

In theory, performance tuning is done by a DBA. But in practice, the DBA is not going to have time to scrutinize every change made to a stored procedure. Learning to do basic tuning might save you from reworking code late in the game.

All tools listed are free with no known expiration date. In order to download them, some sites will require you to register which might result in a phone call or e-mail from the vendor. Some tools are free versions of vendor's purchasable software with features disabled. While others tools are on par or better than what you can purchase.

As we work with other Professionals in our industry, we quickly learn that there are many ways to accomplish a given task. When presented with multiple options in a situation, there are times where one option stands out as the optimal choice based upon our general knowledge of the database engine.

There are also times where the optimal choice may not be so obvious and will vary depending on many considerations such as database architecture, level of use, indexing, hardware configuration or general best practices. Any given approach may perform superbly with one database and drag on another.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 is the latest release of SQL Server. This article will introduce the top 10 features and benefits of SQL Server 2008 R2. The “R2” tag indicates this is an intermediate release of SQL Server and not a major revision. However, there are a number of interesting new features for both DBAs and developers alike. At the time of this article, R2 is available as a CTP (Community Technology Preview). In addition to new features, there are two new editions as well, SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter and SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse.