Chapter 8. Speeding up Database Access

In many websites, database access is the most expensive part of producing a web page. This chapter shows how to identify the most common sources of delays and how to resolve them.

SQL Server is a very large subject in itself. Rather than attempting to cover all aspects of SQL Server database access, this chapter focuses on those areas where you are likely to gain the biggest payoffs.

It consists of two major sections:

• The Pinpointing bottlenecks section shows how to pinpoint and prioritize a number of common bottlenecks, so that you can spend your time where it counts the most. These bottlenecks include:

  • Missing indexes

  • Expensive queries

  • Locking

  • Execution plan reuse

  • Fragmentation

  • Memory

  • Disk

  • CPU

The Fixing bottlenecks section then shows how to actually fix each of the bottlenecks you prioritized in the previous section.

Pinpointing bottlenecks

In this section, we'll identify the biggest bottlenecks. In the next section, we'll see how to fix the bottlenecks we identified...