Most of database tuning has to do with sacrificing one aspect of performance (say, disk storage capacity) for the improvement of another (like the execution speed of a particular kind of query). The authors of this book--they're a team of consultants from a Texas company that specializes in database tuning, as well as from Microsoft--take care to explain the tradeoffs involved in various tuning decisions. Choose one option, they say, and performance metric A will improve at the expense of metric B. Having explained the design considerations for various tuning strategies, they walk their readers through how to do the tuning they're talking about. Instructions aren't for the clueless, but they're fully adequate for SQL Server users who know their way around the interface generally. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to make databases served by Microsoft SQL Server 2000 run as fast and as efficiently as possible by tweaking the way it runs. Emphasis is placed on read/write operations (including SQL Server's way of interacting with RAID arrays), performance monitors, and settings for processor, disk, and RAM usage. There's also a lot of information on capacity planning and system sizing.