7 Steps to Enhancing SQL Server Performance

If SQL Server is giving you grief, there are a number of performance tweaks you can make to bring it back up to speed.

Here are just a few things to do to ensure that your server operates optimally and the services it hosts are unhindered by unnecessary bottlenecks.

Optimize queries

Query optimization is an important part of performance tuning in SQL Server for obvious reasons. If your queries are not composed efficiently, it could lead to sluggish performance, conflicts and all sorts of other hiccups.

There are lots of ways to write effective SQL server queries, and any DBA worth their salt will be willing to keep tinkering over time to achieve measurable improvements.

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Increase memory availability

Running SQL Server can be a pretty RAM-intensive process and so if your database is struggling to keep up, adding more memory can be a good way to overcome this.

You do not need to necessarily upgrade the physical hardware to achieve this, as simply allocating more of the server’s onboard memory to running the SQL platform may be enough. This is also an issue you can solve through cloud migration, offloading the responsibility of maintaining and updating server hardware to a third-party provider.

Defragment the database

Fragmentation of data can be a millstone around the neck of your SQL Server implementation, so be sure to carry out defragmentation so that the storage is able to respond more swiftly to queries and avoid I/O speed issues.

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Add more storage

Server performance can slow to a crawl if there is simply not enough room left on your hard disks. This can also compromise the efficiency of defragmentation itself, so if you are nearing the capacity of your storage, it is almost certainly time to add more or manage your data so that any unnecessary information is deleted.

While making this upgrade you should probably take the time to replace any spinning platter HDDs with more modern SDDs, if this is within your budget. This can improve read and write speeds, as well as provide better resilience and reliability.

Update software

If you have not installed the latest version of SQL Server or kept up to date with the other software packages that are relevant to your particular setup, then you could be compromising performance as a result.

Installing updates, while it can be a hassle, will not only address performance issues but will also patch security flaws, so it should be considered essential.

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Check suspicious processes

You could find that your server hardware is being taxed not because the database requests are coming in thick and fast and it cannot keep up, but instead because some rogue process has been allowed to monopolize available resources.

There are a number of different apps that could cause such a snarl-up, so keeping tabs on which processes are running and how they are utilizing different aspects of the server will let you spot issues sooner.

Invest in a new CPU

Even if you have written optimal queries and dealt with all of the other potential problems that might hold back SQL server performance, unless you have adequate CPU overhead to take on the processes that are central to the smooth running of the database then the rest of your work will have been for naught.

Thankfully, a CPU upgrade is becoming a more affordable option and chips with plenty of physical cores and even more logical threads can be had for less cash than you might imagine. So, in short, a mixture of hardware and software tweaks will get you the SQL server performance boosts, you crave.