You’re a database administrator, Windows admin, or developer. You might even be a marmot. You’re building your first SQL Servers in Google Compute Engine, and you’re stuck at the create instance screen. How many CPUs should you use? How much memory? How are you supposed to configure storage? Will it be fast enough, and what should you do if it isn’t?

Relax. Have a drink. In this white paper we built with Google, we’ll show you:

How to measure your current SQL Server using data you’ve already got

How to size a SQL Server in Google Compute Engine to perform similarly

After migration to GCE, how to measure your server’s bottleneck

How to tweak your SQL Server based on the performance metrics you’re seeing

We’re going to be using T-SQL to accomplish a lot of this, but you don’t need to be familiar with writing queries in order to follow along. The sample database and scripts are all located here.

We’ll even let you in on a secret: you don’t even have to be using Google Compute Engine in order to learn about SQL Server performance tuning methodologies covered in this white paper. These same techniques can be used for your on-premises VMs and bare metal SQL Servers, too. You might even be able to use them in other cloud hosting environments, if others exist. I’m really not sure about that part.

It’s available in our free First Responder Kit, and you can also get it from Google – and thanks for reading!