Database Engine Tuning Advisor How-to Topics

The performance of an enterprise database system can depend on its physical database design, which includes indexes, indexed views, and partitioning strategies. Microsoft SQL Server provides the Database Engine Tuning Advisor, a tool you can use to tune the physical design of your database. Database Engine Tuning Advisor uses a representative workload in the form of a Transact-SQL script, a trace file, or a trace table, to analyze the effects of running that workload on databases that have been selected for tuning. After consuming the workload, Database Engine Tuning Advisor produces a recommended configuration of physical database design structures to improve performance for the workload that was tuned.

The topics in this section provide procedures for how to use both interfaces of the Database Engine Tuning Advisor: the graphical user interface (GUI) and the command-line utility program dta.exe. For an introduction to using this tool, see Tutorial: Database Engine Tuning Advisor.

In This Section

• How to: Create Workloads

• How to: Tune a Database

• How to: View Tuning Output

• How to: Implement Tuning Recommendations

• How to: Create XML Input Files

• How to: Perform Exploratory Analysis

• How to: Review, Evaluate, and Clone Tuning Sessions

See Also

Concepts

Database Engine Tuning Advisor Overview

Other Resources

Tuning the Physical Database Design