Many aspects of a database system’s configuration will affect the performance of queries running on that DBMS. However, there is one single component that has the greatest impact on DBMS performance, and that, of course, is disk (IO) access.

It’s a broad topic and all aspects of it are pretty well covered in various blogs and technical articles, but there’s not much out there that gathers it all together. The intention of this series of posts is to try consolidate some of this information and focus in on some of the functions and procedures that can be used to monitor, troubleshoot and configure SQL Server disk configuration and most, importantly, disk performance. It won’t be exhaustive and cover every conceivable option, but will be based on experience gained whilst working at Sybase and Microsoft and sprinkling of ‘real world’ database administration experience.

I’ve split the topic up into smaller sub-topics in order to make it more manageable:

1. Partition offsets
2. Tags: Disk performance, IO
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