Thom Haagenrud Database Performance and Optimization

Why is your database slow-and how do you fix it? Slow applications, timeouts, excessive CPU usage, memory pressure, and unpredictable response times often trace back to one underlying problem: inefficient data access. Database Performance and Optimization provides a practical guide to understanding what happens when a database processes a request-and how to identify and resolve the bottlenecks that stand between your applications and reliable, responsive data access. Rather than treating performance as a collection of isolated tricks, this book develops a systematic approach to diagnosing and improving database workloads. Inside, you'll explore: • How indexes affect data access and why the wrong indexing strategy can make workloads slower • How databases process statements and how to interpret execution behavior • How to identify CPU, memory, storage, and I/O pressure • How to recognize common causes of slow workloads and inefficient data access • How to use monitoring and performance metrics to locate bottlenecks • How to analyze execution plans and investigate inefficient operations • How to approach performance tuning methodically instead of relying on guesswork • How to evaluate performance changes and avoid optimizations that simply move the bottleneck elsewhere Whether you're a database administrator, software developer, data engineer, systems engineer, or technology professional who works with production data, this book gives you a framework for thinking about database performance from diagnosis through optimization. The goal isn't simply to make one statement run faster. It's to help you understand why a workload behaves the way it does, determine where the real constraint lies, and make informed changes that produce measurable results. If you want to move beyond trial-and-error troubleshooting and develop a disciplined approach to database performance engineering, this book gives you the concepts and practical framework to do it.