Dig into the internals of tuning and optimization features in SQL Server 2005—with insights from leading SQL Server experts. This in-depth guide delivers best practices, pragmatic advice, and code samples to help you enable efficient, effective queries—and optimize database performance. Discover how to: Create a baseline and monitor workload by using System Monitor and DMVs Design, manipulate, and manage traces to isolate database performance issues Audit user activity by using built-in default, black box, and Common Criteria traces Analyze query execution using scans and seeks, joins, aggregations, unions, and parallelism Generate efficient and cost-effective queries using cached plans or new plans Detect and resolve locking, blocking, and deadlocking concurrency issues Use best practices to diagnose and troubleshoot response time, throughput, and scalability issues PLUS—Includes Transact-SQL code samples and on the Web