OK, pretty much any DBA worth their salt has read Brent Ozar's (Blog | Twitter) blog about getting a baseline of your server's performance counters and then getting the same counters at regular intervals afterwards so that you can track performance trends and evidence how you are making your servers faster or cope with extra load without costing your boss any money for hardware upgrades. No? well, go read it now. I can wait a while as there is a great video there too...http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2006/12/dba-101-using-perfmon-for-sql-performance-tuning/,...(read more)