Essentials of SQL Server Performance for Every Developer – Getting Started

Hello, My name is Rajan Arora, and Welcome to my course “Essentials of SQL Server Performance for Every Developer”. You are reading the article of Module 1 Getting Started, Part 1 Course Introduction. If you are new to this course please start it from the Introduction Article for better understanding. Thank You

So Lets Start..

In this course, I’m going to show you what you need to know as a developer about SQL Server to make sure that your data access code is performing well. As a developer, I am assuming that you are already comfortable in analyzing and debugging code in Languages like C# and Java, but you may be uncomfortable with your level of knowledge of SQL Server, and how things work in the database.

In this course, I will help you feel more comfortable when working with SQL Server, especially for the times you are diagnosing and solving the performance issue. And this is the most important part because in almost all systems that we build our database is a critical component of the whole system. So it is very important to understand that a database like SQL Server works so that we can make sure that we are getting the most out of it.

In this course we are going to focus on the performance aspects that we as a developer have control over, that is making SQL statements run as efficiently as possible, and making sure that our application avoids the use of some well-known data access anti-patterns that are a common cause for the performance problems. This will give you several benefits for the applications that we build.

First, efficient SQL statements mean that our statements will run faster, making our application more responsive to our valuable users.

Second, efficient data access means that our application will be more scalable, so we will be able to serve more numbers of users and transactions on the same hardware.

Finally, we know that many applications are deployed on the cloud, either as SQL Server deployed on a virtual machine hosted in the cloud or by using a platform as a service solution like SQL Azure. When you are hosting in the cloud, you have to pay for the resources you use, so if you have any inefficient SQL, it doesn’t just make your application slow, but it actually costs more to run since you are using more resources. So you can see, there are pretty many reasons why we want to understand how we can access our data in SQL Server as efficiently as possible.

Now there are some arguments that SQL Server performance is solely the domain of the Database Administrator, but I believe it is important equally for application developers to have a strong grip of SQL server performance concepts, 

So let’s discuss in the next article, why you as an application developer should learn about SQL Server performance.

In the next article, we are going to see, “Why Developer should understand SQL Performance“