Performance Management and Capacity Planning for Microsoft SQL Server

This paper describes the author’s experiences in performance management and capacity planning for systems based on Microsoft’s SQL Server database management product. The paper covers SQL Server database design, the resource consumption and performance data sources that are available, the way in which a monitoring regime was established, and the important areas that were addressed when tuning for optimal performance. The paper concludes with a description of the techniques employed to establish and verify a capacity plan using modeling techniques.