SQL Server Performance Tuning

ScaleSQL Consulting can identify and correct performance bottlenecks in your database server. We work on servers in Kansas City and around the world.

We use Profiler, ClearTrace, wait state analysis and Performance Monitor (perfmon) to identify bottlenecks. This lets us identify which resources are bottlenecks and the queries that are the biggest consume of those resources.

In many cases the performance problem can be corrected by additional indexes or rewriting queries. In some cases we need to look at memory usage, query plan reuse or parallelism.

The tools and approaches we use include:

• Profiler - This tool will identify the individual queries are that are large consumers of CPU and disk resources.
• ClearTrace - Our own custom written tool that aggregates Profiler information to identify which SQL statements or stored procedures are the largest consumer of resources in aggregate. This is often a very different result than looking at individual queries.
• Index Usage - We can identify which indexes are not used and what indexes would inprove performance.
• Disk Performance Analysis - We can review the disk utilization and performance to determine if faster hard drives or increasing memory would improve performance.
• Wait State Analysis - SQL Server will report back all the reasons that queries are waiting. We can analyze this information to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Query Plan Usage - We can identify areas where SQL Server is not able to efficiently reuse query plans.