Slightly off topic but if you have control over these issues...
High level and High Impact.
- For high IO environments make sure your disks are for either RAID 10 or RAID 0+1 or some nested implementation of raid 1 and raid 0.
- Don't use drives less than 1500K.
- Make sure your disks are only used for your Database. IE no logging no OS.
- Turn off auto grow or similar feature. Let the database use all storage that is anticipated. Not necessarily what is currently being used.
- design your schema and indexes for the type queries.
- if it's a log type table (insert only) and must be in the DB don't index it.
- if your doing allot of reporting (complex selects with many joins) then you should look at creating a data warehouse with a star or snowflake schema.
- Don't be afraid of replicating data in exchange for performance!
