People want to make things faster. It’s in our nature as IT professionals. What are you tuning for? I’ve been asking that a lot later. I have to sit back and ask some very basic questions to try to see where people’s IT-related pain is at.

What is your end goal? In my world, I tune SQL Servers on any infrastructure out there – on-premises and in the cloud. I tune for many different factors, all of which are specific to that organization’s needs. I always want to know what we’re tuning for. It makes your efforts more effective, and gives you means to define success criteria.

Are you tuning to improve your SQL Server licensing footprint? You can tune for CPU reduction in repetitive queries. You can index and statistics tune to make certain queries faster and be more efficient, which in turn reduces the CPU, memory, and storage thrash while the commands are executing. You might even be able to use less of the things that SQL Server licensing is based on, namely CPUs (and a distant second is the memory limitations per instance of Standard edition).

Are you tuning for end-user productivity? Can you quantify the pain points the users are ‘feeling’ each and every day? Can you pinpoint the database commands that are underneath those application features? Are they database-driven, or is it more application data handling that is slowing down the function? Maybe the volume of data that the business accesses daily is so high that all-flash storage is the biggest gain you can make. What if faster CPUs, and not just more cores, would get your users a larger bang for the buck? Are your repetitive queries optimal? Can you even access the commands to tune them, such as queries underneath third-party

Continue reading on DavidKlee.net.