(written by Louis Davidson (@DRSQL) and Tim Ford(@SQLAgentMan), published by Simple Talk Publishing 2010)

Firstly, this is a review of a book that I have only partly read. At the time of writing I am in the middle of chapter 4.

There are lots of books about SQL Server and many of them are great for planning how to configure your setup or how to better write TSQL and even how to better organise your procedures and processes to make sure you are as well prepared as possible to manage to your servers and their workloads.

This book is different, it lets you look into what is happening on your server and how well it is performing when executing your queries, right now. In that respect it has the potential to pay for itself in the first few chapters. Whilst working though chapter 3 I found a query that was showing a lot of logical reads and a quick review of the query plan revealed a need for a change to an index to include two columns. I was able to see the query had executed almost 500,000 times so implementing a change from a table scan to an index seek will make a big difference.

This is the reason for a review of a book I have only partly read, if I have made a saving like this already then it seems only fair to recommend the book to other people so they can start optimising their servers too. So, get this book. It’s wholly worth it.

The book will soon be available for free in pdf format here:http://www.simple-talk.com/books/sql-books/ 
or in printed format from Amazon: Dynamic-Management-Views-Performance-Server £12.99 *.