I attended my second meeting on 03/25/08 and the guest speaker was Chris Barth. Chris gave a great presentation on tuning and troubleshooting queries in SQL Server 2005.

Topics

• Steps in determining when a stored procedure should be tuned.
• Seek or Scan? How to read query plans.
• System tables that will help you determine what transact-sql is performing poorly.
• Overviews of SET statements that will assist in troubleshooting transact-sql.
• The negative performance effects resulting from poor performing update or delete queries and stored procedures.
• Steps for writing better performing queries

This was a really good meeting in regards to what we’re doing with our database. I was able to learn a lot about when and when not to tune queries. The biggest lessons I can take from the meeting is to really know your system tables and think pages.