This book approaches Performance tuning from a new perspective. It shows readers how to find performance problems, rather than assuming they already know what the problem is. As such there is more emphasis on diagnostics than in any competitive books. This book also takes a new approach in that we will discuss the limitations imposed on performance tuning by the different stages of a projects life cycle, and help the reader understand how this alters the performance tuning process.

We begin by covering aspects of general end-to-end application tuning (not specific to SQL Server), but then very quickly move to SQL Server specifics, starting with the high level stuff like the basic server resource counters for CPU, memory, and IO, then trying to find the slow queries by looking at SQL Wait types, and using Profiler to find long running, or blocked, or otherwise poorly performing queries. We then move on to demonstrate how to "fix" the performance of those poorly performing queries.

We also cover the different approaches the DBA might take depending on where the target system is in its lifecycle. This includes the things you can do with an application at the early stages of design (e.g., change pretty much anything from the schema on up, including specifying different hardware). We then cover the very different approach when working with a system running in production (mostly index tuning, some server config, limited T-SQL tuning, no schema changes).