Understanding the Fundamentals of Database Performance

Databases can be a performance bottleneck for a lot of applications, and developers and system administrators don’t always understand why. SysAdmins often wonder why the database is consuming so much memory, while developers ask why a query is taking so long. This paper discusses how database engines work and what you need to look for and evaluate when reviewing your workloads. It also looks at the internal operations of the database engine, to see how they can affect overall server performance.

It’s important to understand database servers aren’t like your other servers, and hence need to be managed differently. As part of that overview, we’ll delve into some approaches for optimizing performance and see how to identify anti-patterns in your database queries.