Indexing, Statistics, Query Analyzer.
Microsoft’s flagship database product, the SQL Server, comes in a bewildering array of sizes and prices which fit almost every need. There are free editions for Pocket PC handheld computers, the MSDE is an only slightly less functional, but free version of its bigger brothers. The standard, enterprise and data center editions fit the needs of small to very large corporations. Writing applications which run on the SQL server is not just a matter of making tables and normalizing your data, and then issuing queries against it. The application developer should also be spending time with the database administrator (DBA) planning for performance. If the DBA is not currently around, this series of articles provides a primer for application developers seeking to improve application performance by tweaking the database.
Performance is not simply a matter of having a good database on a fast system. These factors certainly help, and are occasionally decisive, but having a poor database design (not normalized) , poor data access strategy (a high number of unnecessary reads / writes or editing too much data) are the number one performance killers.
This article will use a sample database, pubs, to illustrate the techniques used. This database is based is delivered with every SQL Server installation, and can be found in the \install subdirectory in your SQL Server folder.
