March 2008 - Posts

• Barcelona SAP SD 2-tier

  Initial Barcelona performance results are out. The benchmark is SAP 2-tier, which is not surprising. I do not know this benchmark well, but from what I have seen of SAP installations, it is network round-trip intensive. Not that the network bandwidth Read More... Posted Monday, March 31, 2008 1:08 AM by jchang | 2 Comments Filed under: Performance

• Execution Plan Costs

  In a later blog, I want to talk about parallel execution plans. Before jumping into that topic, it is helpful to first discuss some points on interpreting execution plans. So here goes. The purpose of the cost based optimizer is to determine the best Read More... Posted Saturday, March 29, 2008 9:36 PM by jchang | 7 Comments Filed under: cost based optimizer, internals Attachment(s): LoopJoinOuterSourceRowCount.jpg

• About 64-bit

  Back in the 1997 time frame, I gave a presentation projecting out when 64-bit operating systems and applications should become pervasive in the high volume platforms. My best estimate was this would be some time in 2003 or 2004. This meant that hardware Read More... Posted Friday, March 28, 2008 4:16 PM by jchang | 13 Comments Filed under: 64-bit, internals, Performance

• TPC-H comments

  TPC-H is under appreciated for its informational value by both vendors and end users. Running this data warehouse benchmark requires both good scaling of parallel execution plans, and the ability to allocate resources between queries with parallel execution Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008 10:34 PM by jchang | 0 Comments Filed under: Performance

• TPC-E and TPC-C Comments

  As people are well aware, Microsoft is steering away from TPC-C to the new TPC-E for OLTP benchmarking. There is a slide deck on the www.tpc.org website outlining all the reasons for going to a new benchmark over TPC-C which has a very long history and Read More... Posted Friday, March 07, 2008 4:47 PM by jchang | 3 Comments Filed under: Performance

• Storage Performance for SQL Server

  There is a perplexing lack of material on overall storage performance strategy for database servers. Too much of the content is narrowly focused on tuning techniques to improve performance over an unknown base. First, storage system IO performance is Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 04, 2008 1:46 PM by jchang | 21 Comments Filed under: Performance, Storage