What are the top 3 performance Issues that you encounter with your SQL Servers?

I am a student from Fontys University in Eindhoven, and I am currently carrying out a series of interviews to help with the development of a SQL Server tool and I would like to get feedback from the experts in the field.

One of my questions is:

What are the top 3 performance issues that you encounter with your SQL Server Instances and how do you identify those problems?

Particularly I am interested in the scripts and the tools used to measure this.

Off the top of my head - top 3 query problems:

• Implicit conversions

• Bad indexing strategies (too many or not enough or the wrong kind)

• Using SELECT * instead of naming just the fields you need

There's a lot more around server-level config problems, database schema problems, hardware problems, etc. I wrote a script to quickly analyze servers looking for these kinds of problems:

http://www.brentozar.com/blitz/

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#4448, answer score: 22