Summary

This chapter walked you through performance- related topics that you should consider while designing and implementing a high-performance application. As a starting point, skilled team members are vital . More than anything else, a skilled and experienced staff is the best predictor and indicator of a project's potential success. You must establish performance criteria and prototype, test, and monitor performance throughout development.

We also reviewed techniques that you can use in database design and in making indexing decisions. We saw how to deal with lock contention issues and how to resolve deadlocks. We also discussed how the query optimizer chooses a plan and what you can do to ensure that it performs as well as possible.

As you make and monitor changes, remember to change just one variable at a time. When you change multiple variables at the same time, it becomes impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of any one of them. This goes for all changes, whether they are related to design, indexing, the use of an optimizer hint, or a configuration setting. This is a fundamental aspect of all performance optimization. In the next chapter, we'll look at configuration and performance monitoring.