It is a crucial skill for software teams that use relational databases to be able to get good performance out of SQL. Although vital is one adjective we could use, there are more. Sadly, rare is another word that comes to mind.
It is common for software professionals to think that all MySQL settings can be left as they are. That’s not true. RDBMS default settings are not always optimal for your application. It would have been easy to avoid performance issues by optimizing these settings.
However, others believe that SQL performance tuning is only the responsibility of DBAs, no matter how important it is. Both of them are wrong.
There isn’t always a person with the official title “DBA” in every company. Business size plays a major role in this.
If your team has a dedicated DBA, however, you shouldn’t overwhelm them with tasks they could handle themselves. It isn’t unreasonable for a developer to figure out and fix a slow query if they are capable of doing so. It is important to emphasize that the relevant word here is can-they often cannot.
The problem has to be fixed, but how? The concept is simple: we train developers how to do performance tuning in SQL Server and find slow SQL queries. You’ll find seven tips to help you accomplish that in this percona MySQL post.
How Do You Tune SQL Performance?
To provide you with tips on how to perform SQL performance tuning within your software company, let’s define what SQL performance tuning is first.
The question is, what does SQL performance tuning involve? You surely have some kind of idea already, even though it may be vague.
Essentially, SQL performance tuning involves making queries run as fast as possible in relational databases.
The process of SQL performance tuning can be viewed as a collection of tools and techniques, as you’ll see in this post. Instead, it’s a set of approaches using many different techniques, tools, and methods.
Five ways to locate slow SQL performance queries
Below is a list of seven ways you can identify slow SQL queries in SQL Server.
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Create a plan for executing the project
SQL Server Management Studio allows you to generate graphical execution plans, which can be used to diagnose slow queries. Following the execution of a query, the execution plan is generated. What is the best way to develop an execution plan?
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Track usage of resources
Performance of SQL databases is directly related to resource usage. If you want to improve, you need to measure what you do.
What are your options?
If you are using Windows, you can measure SQL Server performance with the System Monitor tool. In addition to objects, it displays performance and behavior statistics for SQL Servers.
Consequently, you can monitor both SQL Server and Windows counters concurrently using System Monitor, so you can examine whether they correlate.
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Take advantage of the Database Engine Tuning Advisor
Tuning SQL performance requires analysis of Transact-SQL statements run against the database you are tuning. You can analyze performance implications using Database Engine Tuning Advisor.
This tool goes beyond merely analyzing your data: It also makes recommendations regarding what you should do as a result of its analysis. For example, it might recommend that you add or remove indices.
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Analyze SQL DMVs to find slow queries
The dynamic management views (DMVs) built into SQL Server are one of its best features. The number of them is numerous, and they cover many topics.
DMVs provide several tables containing information about queries, execution plans, recent queries, etc. When used together, these can offer some incredible insights.
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The APM Solution for query reporting
The ability to track SQL queries is a great feature of application performance management (APM) tools. This software tracks SQL queries among multiple database systems, including SQL Server. The Retrace command shows you when a query was executed, how long it took, and what transactions were involved.
SQL performance tuning can benefit from this information. The data are collected by analyzing your application code at runtime using lightweight performance profiling solutions.
