Sometimes the difference between consultants and employees boils down to one thing: documentation.

Us DBAs know exactly what we think is wrong with an application, and we’ll tell anybody who’ll listen, but what does management do? They hire outsiders to come in, ask a lot of questions, and tell us what we already knew.

The solution is to write a SQL Server performance review just as if we were consultants. The goal is to deliver a solid document that explains:

• The Effects - A list of objective, solid measurements of system performance
• The Causes - An analysis of what is causing those metrics to be worse than we want
• The Mitigations - Steps to take in order to reduce or work around the problems

In the videos below, Brent Ozar explains how to write a SQL Server performance report.

SQL Server Performance Report Tutorial Videos

Part 1: Gathering the Evidence with Perfmon and Profiler

http://tutorials.sqlserverpedia.com/SQLServerPedia-20090119-PerformanceReport1.flv

For more tutorial videos like this, check out the SQL Server Tutorials page.

Part 2: Recommending Mitigations and Writing the Report

http://tutorials.sqlserverpedia.com/SQLServerPedia-20090122-PerformanceReport2.flv

The Sample Performance Report Template

To get started, check out a sample performance report.