Performance tuning is necessary to monitor and allocate resources for networking, storage, and computing. When these resources are reallocated, it improves the system by allowing access to more data over existing networks, increases the available storage capacity, minimizes costs for new services or functionalities, and increases response time for certain applications or users.
For database performance tuning, you typically work with an SQL database. This is a vital skill that most software teams need, especially if you work with relational databases. If you work within a team that constantly leaves all the RDBMS settings on default, then your database isn’t working at the optimal level. You can overcome many issues just with some tuning. In addition, tuning isn’t just for DBAs. If you are a programmer, you should know how to tune and perfect your system through performance tuning.
How it Works
SQL performance tuning revolves around querying relation databases so that they run as fast they possibly can. It’s not one simple tool or technique either. To complete, you have to make use of multiple techniques, processes, and tools.
Monitor Resource Use
When you want to check your database’s performance, you can start with using the System Monitor tool in Windows to look at your SQL server. This lets you identify different objects, behavior of other objects, and performance counters.
Database Engine Advisor
You can also check out Transact-SQL statements that run against the database for which you are tuning. The Database Engine Tuning Advisor actually looks at all of the implications. You can also get recommendations on actions to do that will improve your performance, such as creating or removing certain indexes. This can help you drastically improve the response time of your SQL database.
How to Find Sloq Queries with SQL DMVs
You can use dynamic management views (DMVs), which is built into every SQL database. There are many of them, and they all provide different information on a wide variety of issues. This can be helpful if you know your database is slow, but you can’t pinpoint the issue from the Database Engine Tuning Advisor.
You can use DMBs to quer stats, look at recent queries, and investigate execution plans. For example, you can use queries to find the most writes, reads, worker time for CPUs, and much more. The results show you how many resources are being used by different queries with recommendations on how to solve the issue.
Query Reporting via APM Solutions
There are other features you can use through application performance management (APM). This tool gives you a way to track SQL queries. For example, you can use Retrace to track down SQL queries that span several database providers, including your own SQL server. It will tell you how many times a query was executed, the duration of the query, and what transactions triggered it. APM is able to collect this information by conducting profiling against your application code precisely at runtime. You can also search for specific queries with keywords if you can identify the type of issue but not the exact query causing the issue. For example, you may notice an issue when a certain currency is specified. You can search by “currency” to see all related SQL queries.
Next time you have to do some tuning with a SQL server, you’ll have a few different options to check out what’s wrong and come up with a quick solution. Now you don’t have to wait on a DBA to improve your system.
