SQLAuthority News – Tomorrow Online Session – Ancient Trade of Performance Tuning – Index, Beyond Index and No Index

Today in few hours I am going to present on my very favorite subject of performance tuning.

You can read more about this sessions over here.

This presentation is based on the famous book ‘The Art of War’ written in sixth century BC by Sun Tzu. Index is usually a favorite tool of many when it is about performance tuning. However, Index is not everything. Performance tuning is much very deep subject and one needs to understand various aspect of the performance tuning. In today’s session I will cover performance tuning beyond indexes. I have created some real interesting demos.

Sessions Details

Title: Ancient Trade of Performance Tuning – Index, Beyond Index and No Index
Timing: September 29, 2011 11:45am-12:45pm IST
SQL Server Indexes are double edge sword. If used properly it gives tremendous performance improvement of the server. However, there is a dark side of the Index as well, which one needs to learn before using them to improve performance of the query. In this session we will go over various concepts of the Indexes which are not common but extremely important.
Location: Register for Virtual Tech Days

Giveaways

During my session I will ask a simple question. I will give away 5 copies of my SQL Server Wait Stats books to five random person who will answer it correctly. If you have already have this book, I strongly suggest you attend this session as this session will take the performance tuning concepts to next level. I will make sure that I autograph and send this copies to your way.

Performance Tuning Lessons from This Session That Still Apply

This live session and its giveaway are long over, but the title still describes how I think about tuning. Indexes help reads, yet every index has to be maintained on each insert, update and delete. Too many of them slow down writes, use more space and make maintenance take longer.

A good first step is to find indexes that cost more than they give. The view sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats shows how often each index is read through seeks, scans and lookups, and how often it is updated. An index with lots of updates and almost no reads is a candidate to drop. Keep in mind that these numbers reset when SQL Server restarts, so look at them after the server has run through a full business cycle, including month-end work.

Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.