Welcome!

Welcome to the new bloggy home of Microsoft’s small but mighty SQL Performance Team!

Lots of smart folks on the SQL team work on performance, as some part of their job. We do it every waking moment. We live and breathe performance & scalability, across the box, at a code level and at a system level. The components we study and improve range from developer technologies that live in .NET to our great BI products to the core engine components.

We benchmark to understand performance issues and to demonstrate where we stand. We develop prototype solutions and we work together with product development teams to engineer performance improvements. We also build systems for performance assurance. High-quality performance proof points are valuable to our customers, so we also participate in the TPC benchmark process, together with our partners. The right benchmarks drive the industry to improve products to better meet customers’ needs.

We dream of every Microsoft SQL customer smiling because they don’t worry how their database, applications, and tools, perform. We are working hard to make sure each release improves in scalability, and delivers performance that is more predictable and dependable than the last one.

Over time, I hope you’ll find the information shared here interesting, at times entertaining, and always worthwhile enough to earn a few minutes of your reading time each week. We also hope you’ll not be shy in sharing with us your experiences and views on SQL performance.

-David Powell