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Rating: 
Summary: The tuning bible for SQL Server 2000!
Review: As both a professional database consultant and DBA, I must agree that this is hands down the best overall tuning book for SQL Server 2000. It covers the gamut from hardware planning and sizing/tuning to database performance tuning. Easy to read and quite useful! Great job Microsoft Press another winner. Get it and become a tuning god.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Considering the difficulty of the topic, this book is a fairly easy read. The single best thing about the book is that the advice is actionable. You can read this book and immediately begin tuning.Coverage is excellent - performance tuning, capacity planning, setting up disk drives, managing cpu, I/O, network, and memory, index tuning, backups, replication, OLTP versus OLAP, etc. For each subject area, the authors explain the applicable concepts and SQL Server tools, and then systematically explain their application using practical examples. Compared to other performance tuning books, it is an 80/20 book. By this I mean that the authors focus on what is most important and then move on to the next topic. They don't get carried away demonstrating how much they know about each concept or go into the minutia of the options of each SQL Server tool. I hope they write more books.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Considering the difficulty of the topic, this book is a fairly easy read. The single best thing about the book is that the advice is actionable. You can read this book and immediately begin tuning. Coverage is excellent - performance tuning, capacity planning, setting up disk drives, managing cpu, I/O, network, and memory, index tuning, backups, replication, OLTP versus OLAP, etc. For each subject area, the authors explain the applicable concepts and SQL Server tools, and then systematically explain their application using practical examples. Compared to other performance tuning books, it is an 80/20 book. By this I mean that the authors focus on what is most important and then move on to the next topic. They don't get carried away demonstrating how much they know about each concept or go into the minutia of the options of each SQL Server tool. I hope they write more books.
Rating: 
Summary: Look elsewhere
Review: I bought this book on the basis of the glowing recommendations here. As I have a number of servers to tune which execute some extremely complex SQL, and I need to be able to look inside with Perfmon and the profiler, I thought this book would be very useful. I particularly wanted help with sysmon.
This book gave me virtually nothing. Its coverage of tuning was shallow, information was repeated unnecessarily, text was copied almost verbatim from BOL, and it provided little or nothing that couldn't be found elsewhere and easily.
It tries to cover everything at the cost of giving real value. For example it provides 15 pages on data warehousing of which 12 are a description of data warehousing so cursory that if you don't know the subject you'll only be confused, and 3 pages on actual tuning which basically say that you should find out whether the bottleneck is CPU/disk/memory then add more CPU/disk/memory respectively.
Sizing and capacity planning are introduced with seven equations without justification. Okay, but completions C is given as the number of transactions that were completed during the observation period, but on the facing page C = 96 seconds [sic]. Did anyone proof-read this? With these and numerous other oddities (trunc. log on chkpt on SQL2000?) I don't know what I can trust.
The mathematics for this section is done and finished in 6 pages.
I was particularly looking for a comprehensive description of sysmon counters. Other than a quick rundown of the obvious ones there's a long list in the appendix of others, including such gems as "lock blocks allocated: the total number of allocated lock blocks". The whole point of buying this book was to find out how to use them, or indeed what they mean (Skipped Ghosted Records/Sec - means what?); merely giving me a list of them is redundant. This was the biggest letdown for me - I need this info!
There are other important omissions. I have spent literally weeks identifying and working round failures in the query plan optimiser. This serious issue is not properly addressed except for a chapter introducing query hints. A taxonomy of optimiser failures and ways of tackling each type might save others from the headaches I've had. Optimiser hints do not always suffice.
The book is rated on the back for user levels IT Implementer and Corporate Developer. That is far too generous.
Rating:
Summary: Performance, Performance, Performance
Review: I tell my clients and users that the two most important services that a DBA provides are security and performance, but not necessarily in that order. If you are a professional SQL Server DBA or a DBA wannabe, performance has to be one of your top skills.
This book, by Edward Whalen, gives you the information that you will need to accomplish the very important task of planning a new SQL Server installation. There is a lot of very useful discussion that relate the physical hardware parameters of the server to the expected performance that users will experience. This discussion includes a comprehensive survey of how the I/O subsytem contributes to the overall server performance. There are also two chapters on sizing and capacity planning, with carefully worked-through examples detailing how to size memory and how to determine appropriate disk and processor configurations for a new installation.
Of course, the other major task in the performance arena is troubleshooting. Although Whalen's book doesn't present a performance troubleshooting checklist, the major theme of this book centers on recognizing and remediating performance problems. In many cases, the book also discusses the origins of the preformance problems. By the time you internalize this book, you'll be able write your own troubleshooting checklist. In my opinion, the two best aspects of this book are:
a) Unlike some other "Performance" books that I have read, this book focuses on performance and not a million other things. It discusses performance, not DTS, not Security, not Internet, etc. It just talks about performance.
b) With the Acknowledgments section thanking Bill Gates twice, and this book being written by Microsoft insiders, I would have expected lots of hype. Pleasantly suprising, but true, this book has no hype. Just plain facts about performance. Good show. I did have one small disappointment with this book, though - I was hoping to get more insight into the use of the Query Analyzer execution plan tools. The fact is that Whalen's discussion of this facility is probably the best information that's out there, but it still falls short. If the authors write another edition, we would all benefit if they could work up some detailed examples that explain the various aspects of the execution plan tools. It would be super if they would provide samples that we could download.
Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: Performance is a responsible and important job. Although you might be doing mostlt reactive tuning, tuning is still what you need and the more tricks you have , the better chance you have to not be beaten .
This book supplies bunch of good stuff to get started.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book. If you read it you will understand why...
Review: Strong recommendations from others brought me to this book and I feel obliged to give back.
This is a masterpiece.Well researched and well written
I Got a hold of a couple of concepts missed in other books because of the lucidity of the examples and explanations.
Great book If you read it you will understand why.... Michael Tubuo Ngong
Rating:
Summary: Great Book. If you read it you will understand why...
Review: Strong recommendations from others brought me to this book and I feel obliged to give back.
This is a masterpiece.Well researched and well written
I Got a hold of a couple of concepts missed in other books because of the lucidity of the examples and explanations.
Great book If you read it you will understand why.... Michael Tubuo Ngong
Rating: 
Summary: Introduction to performance tuning
Review: The `SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning' provides the reader with an extensive overview of the functionality that MSS2000 has for performance tuning. This book has been written by the manufacturer of MS2000, and has therefore some specific properties a reader has to taken into account. One of them is that every single tuning-feature is mentioned, although their relative impact (hence importance) on performance is not discussed. Another one is the white-book nature of the information presented; very general advice for the entrylevel DBA. For example: in the chapter `Hi-performance Backup and recovery' (it has only 18 pages) is says: "plan full backups for off hours", " use differential backups", "use multiple data files" etc.
This book has the title `Technical Reference' and should be regarded as such. The DBA, working in a company which doesn't consider performance-tuning important enough to dedicate a policy to, who is confronted with a sudden structural diminishing of performance and is to find out where this bottleneck stems from will not benefit from this book. For example, the book dedicates a mere two pages on "interpreting Graphical Execution Plans" and gives only 1 example. For a useful checklist on where to look first when confronted with the so-called `query from hell' one should read other books. But for the novice in tuning, the one who is unfamiliar to concepts like locks, RAID, system monitor, I/O,page vs rowlevel, differential backups, how to log in on queryanalyzer, index tuning wizard, etc this book can serve as an introduction. But once past this introduction, this book has served it's purpose.
Rating:
Summary: just great!
Review: This book has great info about SQL Server's tuning procedures. A must if you're a DBA.
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