This course focuses on maximizing the performance of hardware and infrastructure relating to database servers. You will learn the best ways to improve an SQL server's performance and that of its databases through infrastructure choice and configuration settings.
Learning Objectives
- Learn how to set up disks for maximum performance
- Understand how to boost file performance and how to use instant file initialization
- Understand how to optimize TempDB and choose the right VM for your workloads
- Learn how to manage an instance's resources
- Learn how to configure your database as well as your SQL Server system accounts
- Understand how to use Intelligent Query Processing to optimize database performance
- Understand the benefits of using Azure SQL Serverless
Intended Audience
- Database administrators
- Solutions architects
- Anyone interesting in improving the performance of their database
Prerequisites
To the most out of this course, you will need to be familiar with basic Azure concepts, have some knowledge of computer hard drives and networking, and be familiar with databases and their servers.
Let's begin by looking at the various elements that can significantly affect database performance. Throughput best encapsulates how we think of database performance. A simple view of a database is a file residing on a hard drive containing information that we would like to read or modify. In a computer system, long-term storage, the hard drive, or disc is the slowest part, so improvements made to throughput speed from the storage system to the CPU will deliver the most significant performance gains.
Generally speaking, database servers aren't computationally intensive. Their primary role is to write data to disk and read it from disk, sending it to the appropriate client application. It turns out that much of a database server's CPU time is spent waiting for data to be retrieved from the disk.
Managing the multiple requests to read and write data from and to disk is another critical aspect of the database server tuning. With data throughput and multiple requests management in mind, we'll look at storage and file configuration, along with resource configuration. When workloads and storage requirements outstrip the current server setup, we'll look at ways to upgrade as and when required.
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.