Performance tuning is not easy and there aren't any silver bullets, but you can go a surprisingly long way with a few basic guidelines.
In theory, performance tuning is done by a DBA. But in practice, the DBA is not going to have time to scrutinize every change made to a stored procedure. Learning to do basic tuning might save you from reworking code late in the game.
Below is my list of the top 15 things I believe developers should do as a matter of course to tune performance when coding. These are the low hanging fruit of SQL Server performance - they are easy to do and often have a substantial impact. Doing these won't guarantee lightening fast performance, but it won't be slow either.
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