Summary

This chapter walked you through performance-related topics that you should consider when 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 looked at techniques that you can use in database design and in making indexing decisions. We discussed how to deal with lock contention issues and how to resolve deadlocks.

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're related to design, indexing, the use of a query 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.