General SQL Server Whitepapers Links
Microsoft.com SQL Server Learning Center (including whitepapers)
Quick Links to Performance Tuning Whitepapers
SQL Server Performance Tuning Using Wait Statistics: A Beginners Guide (written by Erin Stellato and Jonathan Kehayias of SQLskills.com)
Diagnosing and Resolving Latch Contention on SQL Server (tech reviewed by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
Diagnosing and Resolving Spinlock Contention on SQL Server (tech reviewed by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
VMware Links and Whitepapers
VMware VROOM! Blog
Performance Characterization of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 6.5
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 6.5
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 6.0
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.5
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.1
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.0
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0
SQL Server 2016 Whitepapers
Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2016 e-book
SQL Server 2016 Deeper Insights Across Data
SQL Server 2016 Hyper-scale Cloud
SQL Server 2016 In-memory OLTP
SQL Server 2016 In-memory OLTP and Columnstore Feature Comparision
SQL Server 2016 Mission Critical Performance
SQL Server 2014 Whitepapers
Database Backup Encryption
In-Memory OLTP – Common Workload Patterns and Migration Considerations
Optimizing Your Query Plans with the SQL Server 2014 Cardinality Estimator
Running SQL Server with Hyper-V Dynamic Memory – Best Practices and Considerations
SQL Server 2012 Whitepapers
AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using AlwaysOn Availability Groups (written by Joe Sack and tech reviewed by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using Failover Cluster Instances and Availability Groups (written by Joe Sack of SQLskills.com)
AlwaysOn Solution Guide: Offloading Read-Only Workloads to Secondary Replicas
Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn Solutions Guide for High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Migration Guide: Migrating to AlwaysOnAvailability Groups from Prior Deployments Combining Database Mirroring and Log Shipping Part I – Prescriptive Guidance
Migration Guide: Migrating to SQL Server 2012 Failover Clustering and Availability Groups from Prior Clustering and Mirroring Deployments Part I – Prescriptive Guidance
Plan Caching and Recompilation in SQL Server 2012
Resource Governor in SQL Server 2012
SQL Server 2008 Whitepapers
Analyzing I/O Characteristics and Sizing Storage Systems for SQL Server Database Applications
Auditing in SQL Server 2008
Data Compression: Strategy, Capacity Planning and Best Practices (tech reviewed by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
Data Loading Performance Guide
Database Encryption in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition
FILESTREAM Storage in SQL Server 2008 (written by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Microsoft’s SAP Data Tier: A SQL Server 2008 Technical Case Study (written by Joe Sack of SQLskills.com)
High Availability with SQL Server 2008 (written by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
Improving Performance with SQL Server 2008 Indexed Views
Partitioned Table and Index Strategies Using SQL Server 2008
Plan Caching in SQL Server 2008
Proven SQL Server Architectures for High Availability and Disaster Recovery (written by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com, link is to cached PDF copy)
SQL Server 2008 Policy-Based Management
SQL Server Replication: Providing High-Availability Using Database Mirroring (written by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
Statistics Used by the Query Optimizer in Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2008
Tuning the Performance of Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008 (tech reviewed by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
Understanding and Controlling Parallel Query Processing in SQL Server
Understanding and Using PowerShell Support in SQL Server 2008
Using SQL Server 2008 Extended Events (written by Jonathan Kehayias of SQLskills.com)
Using the Resource Governor
SQL Server 2005 Whitepapers
Advantages of a 64-bit Environment
Batch Compilation, Recompilation, and Plan Caching Issues in SQL Server 2005
Comparing Tables Organized with Clustered Indexes versus Heaps
Database Administrator’s Guide to SQL Server Database Engine .NET CLR Environment (written by Kimberly L. Tripp of SQLskills.com)
Database Mirroring and Log Shipping Working Together
Database Mirroring: Alerting on Database Mirroring Events
Database Mirroring: Best Practices and Performance Considerations
Database Snapshot Performance Considerations under I/O-Intensive Workloads
Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server
Improving Performance with SQL Server 2005 Indexed Views
Implementing Application Failover with Database Mirroring
Online Indexing Operations in SQL Server 2005
Partial Database Availability
Partitioned Tables and Indexes in SQL Server 2005 (written by Kimberly L. Tripp of SQLskills.com)
Physical Database Storage Design (reviewed by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
Predeployment I/O Best Practices
Proven SQL Server Architectures for High Availability and Disaster Recovery (written by Paul S. Randal of SQLskills.com)
Reducing Database Size by Using Vardecimal Storage Format
Reporting Services: Planning for Scalability and Performance with Reporting Services
Scalability: Solutions for Highly Scalable Database Applications: An analysis of architectures and technologies (includes details/comparisons with Oracle RAC)
SODA: How SQL Server 2005 Enables Service Oriented Database Architectures
SODA: Service Oriented Database Architecture: App Server-Lite?
SQL Server 2005 Failover Clustering White Paper
SQL Server 2005 for Oracle Professionals
SQL Server 2005 Management Tools Overview (written by Kimberly L. Tripp of SQLskills.com)
SQL Server 2005 Security Overview for Database Administrators
SQL Server 2005 Snapshot Isolation (written by Kimberly L. Tripp of SQLskills.com)
SQL Server I/O Basics (SQL Server 2000)
SQL Server I/O Basics, Chapter 2 (SQL Server 2005)
Strategies for Partitioning Relational Data Warehouses in Microsoft SQL Server
Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2005
Working with tempdb in SQL Server 2005