Can your SQL Server explain why it's slow, or are you still guessing?
For many data professionals, performance tuning feels like chasing shadows. Queries stall, dashboards crawl, and no one can say why. Microsoft SQL Server for Data Professionals gives you the discipline, methods, and tested workflows to turn that uncertainty into precision.
At its core, this book teaches one principle: reliable performance is engineered, not improvised. Frank Reiniger distills decades of production-tested experience into a repeatable system for diagnosing, measuring, and improving SQL Server environments across development, analytics, and cloud operations. Whether you manage uptime, tune queries, or build Power BI models, you'll learn how to reason about data systems like an engineer, predictably and confidently.
You will learn how to:
Build a reproducible performance baseline using DMVs, Query Store, and PerfMon, the foundation of every tuning decision.
Design efficient, set-based T-SQL and master window functions, upserts, and incremental loads that scale.
Apply indexing, statistics, and partitioning strategies that eliminate bottlenecks, not just mask them.
Implement Intelligent Query Processing features and understand when automation helps, or hurts.
Configure memory, MAXDOP, and tempdb safely for both OLTP and analytic workloads.
Develop observability pipelines with Extended Events, Power BI, or Grafana that expose performance drift before it becomes an outage.
Automate deployments with Terraform, Bicep, and CI/CD, and design resilient HA/DR architectures with Availability Groups.
Integrate SQL Server with data science and BI ecosystems, from in-database machine learning to Power BI semantic modeling.
Every chapter ends with Quick Labs and Role Pathways, compact, prescriptive workflows tailored for DBAs, BI developers, analysts, and data scientists. You'll know exactly what to check, what to change, and how to prove the results.
Microsoft SQL Server for Data Professionals is not a recipe book, it's a system of thinking. If you want to stop guessing, start measuring, and lead your team with data-driven confidence, this is your playbook.
Master the engine. Engineer performance. Build systems that explain themselves.
Get your copy today and make SQL Server your most predictable ally.
