Discover essential strategies for optimizing tier-1 SQL Server performance in this comprehensive conference talk from PASS Data Community Summit. Learn current recommendations for configuring and maintaining high-performance database systems, whether in your datacenter or on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines. Explore performance considerations at various levels, including platform, physical and virtual server configurations, and Infrastructure as a Service. Gain insights into server configuration, licensing options, parallelism, memory management, I/O considerations, and trace flags. Understand the importance of tempdb optimization and partitioning for maximizing SQL Server performance. Benefit from the expertise of the SQL Server team as they provide practical guidance to enhance your database system's capabilities and efficiency.