Welcome to Authoring SQL Server Performance Assessments.

Note: Included in the course are two separate templates you can use to craft your own assessments. Please feel free to use them in any capacity you'd like.

When you go to the doctor he/she performs a basic list of checks on you.  What’s your temperature? What’s your blood pressure? Height? Weight?

A health check is very similar to looking at the basics. Just like a doctor SQL Server DBAs want to see just how bad of shape our patient is really in.

In order to do that we create health checks on the instance.  I used the word instance not database. Performance tuning is not about tuning an individual database it’s about tuning the entire instance.

Why? Because most real world boxes have more than one database on them. Those databases all share the big three. The big three are: CPU, Memory and Disk.

A heath check or an assessment seeks to highlight the two main principles of performance tuning. The first is speeding up transactions. The second is reducing resource consumption of the big three.  In our checks and assessments we point out ways to speed up transactions and reduce resource consumption.

The difference between a health check and performance tuning assessment is the grain and depth. Health checks are brief highlights of how the box is doing. Like a physical for you and I.

Performance tuning assessments are highly detailed documents that break down the server into many components. These border on forensic analysis of the server and give the organization a very detailed look at how their servers are performing.

You’ll decide the depth of your assessments but 10 pages seems to be a great length.  Don’t worry, ten pages isn’t a lot when we start adding pictures. Your assessments have to have pictures to help those who are not technical or not as technical see what you are doing.

NOTE: This is NOT a course on performance tuning. This course is about creating two different types of SQL Server Reports, the health check and the performance tuning assessment. 

Thanks for your interest in crafting SQL Server health checks and performance tuning assessments.  We will see you in the course!!!