Courtesy of Malik, Sahil

My clients are lucky. I have walked in the door and within a week, with no hardware changes, they saw their SharePoint installations running 400 percent faster than before. I know that’s a tall claim, but as a consultant with very wide exposure, I can say with some confidence that most SharePoint installations’ databases do not get the attention they deserve. Maybe it is a disciplinary thing, DBAs are usually not SharePoint experts, and SharePoint experts are usually not DBAs, so the poor SharePoint SQL Server is left alone to suffer under its default settings.

The issue is that out-of-the-box SharePoint content databases are absolutely terrible for performance. Are you running your production SharePoint installation with the default database settings? If so, you really need to read this article.