Chapter 2

Understanding SQL Server Architecture

If you're going on a road trip, you better bring a map. Without that map you could end up anywhere. If you travel without a map and without clear directions, you'll probably end up far from your intended destination. The same is true with SQL Server. Unless you understand SQL Server architecture, you'll never know where you might end up on your performance-tuning and database-development journey.

This chapter strives to be your road map so that you don't have to ask for directions. Although we could never exhaustively cover SQL Server internals and architecture in one chapter, we hope that this one will at least be a good map for you to follow as you learn more about how SQL Server behaves. In this chapter, you will learn to: