My company has a couple applications running on an SQL 2008 R2 backend that has always been a bit of a dog. It does a lot of work and performance is an issue. Up till now. We just accepted the performance. Recently, I was asked to see if there was anything we could do. Being a sysadmin, my first inclination is to throw more hardware at it. More CPU, more memory.
But, I want to make sure that the hardware we have is being correctly utilized first. Tuned to perfection. I know this is an art form. The system is pretty out of the box and the application vendor isn't into tweaking our server.
I have run performance metrics. But, I am no DBA. Its pretty greek to me. Are there companies that we do this kind of tuning for you? Any quick and simple things to check? Where do I begin?