It’s never easy to "introduce" you to six to nine months of work. The concept of an introduction is simple enough: what’s the purpose of the book, who is the book written for, tips on how best to use the book. However, the introduction also has to set the stage for the rest of the book. As you’ll see when you read it, I open and close the book with a simple concept: query tuning is hard. When I present live sessions on this topic, I'll tell people up front. The easy way to tune queries is to simply throw money at the problem. Buy bigger hardware. Move to a higher service tier on your cloud provider. You can always make things faster by spending more money. It’s when the money runs out that you might just need to spend something else, time. Time learning how to identify poorly performing queries, understand how to investigate them to see where the problem may lie, and then apply a fix and validate that it worked. That’s where this book comes in.
