Joe Chang

What breaks with GPT disk partitions greater than 2TB?

2011-12-10T02:06:00Z

In one of the recent Windows OS versions, GUID Partition Table (GPT) became an option in addition to Master Boot Record (MBR) for creating disk partitions, with GPT supporting volumes larger than 2TB. In MBR, a 32-bit unsigned integer addresses 512-byte sectors (yeah, there is a push to adapt 4K sectors), so the disk partition limit was 2TB (2.19x10 12 ). OK, then fine. The Windows Server OS supports GPT and SQL Server has been tested to support >2TB partitions. But to what extent has this been...(read more)

Intel Server Strategy Shift with Sandy Bridge EN & EP

2011-11-29T19:04:00Z

The arrival of the Sandy Bridge EN and EP processors, expected in early 2012, will mark the completion of a significant shift in Intel server strategy. For the longest time 1995-2009, the strategy had been to focus on producing a premium processor designed for 4-way systems that might also be used in 8-way systems and higher. The objective for 2-way systems was use the desktop processor that later had a separate brand and different package & socket to leverage the low cost structure in driving...(read more)

New SQL Server 2012 per core licensing – Thank you Microsoft

2011-11-16T20:19:00Z

Many of us have probably seen the new SQL Server 2012 per core licensing, with Enterprise Edition at $6,874 per core super ceding the $27,495 per socket of SQL Server 2008 R2 (discounted to $19,188 for 4-way and $23,370 for 2-way in TPC benchmark reports) with Software Assurance at $6,874 per processor? Datacenter was $57,498 per processor, so the new per-core licensing puts 2012 EE on par with 2008R2 DC, at 8-cores per socket. This is a significant increase for EE licensing on Intel Xeon 5600 6-core...(read more)

TPC-H Benchmarks - Westmere-EX versus RISC

2011-10-10T20:03:00Z

There has been relatively litle activity in TPC Benchmarks recently with the exception of the raft of Dell TPC-H results with Exa Solutions. It could be that systems today are so powerful that few people feel the need for benchmarks. IBM published an 8-way Xeon E7 (Westmere-EX) TPC-E result of 4593 in August, slightly higher than the Fujitsu result of 4555, published in May 2011. Both systems have 2TB memory. IBM prices 16GB DIMMs at $899 each, $115K for 2TB or $57.5K per TB. (I think a 16MB DIMM...(read more)

New Fusion ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo

2011-10-04T22:06:00Z

Fusion-iO just announced the new ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo on Oct 2011 (at some conference of no importance). The MLC models will be available late November and the SLC models afterwards. See the Fusion-iO press release for more info. Below are the Fusion-IO ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo specifications. The general idea seems to be for the ioDrive2 to match the realizable bandwidth of a PCI-E gen2 x4 slot (1.6GB/s) and for the ioDrive2 Duo to match the bandwidth of a PCI-E gen2 x8 slot (3.2GB/s). I assume...(read more)

Consumer SSDs with SQL Server

2011-09-17T03:21:00Z

Over the last two years, I have stood up several proof-of-concept (POC) database server systems with consumer grade SSD storage at cost $2-4K per TB. Of course production servers are on enterprise class SSD, Fusion-IO and others, typically $25K+ per TB. (There are some special situations where it is viable to deploy a pair of data warehouse servers with non-enterprise SSD). PCI-E SSDs - OCZ RevoDrive, RevoDrive X2, & RevoDrive 3 X2 The first POC system was a Dell T710 with 2 Xeon 5670 processors...(read more)

Laptop for database performance consultants

2011-09-02T21:39:00Z

Today, it is actually possible to build a highly capable database system in a laptop form factor. There is no point to running a production database on a laptop. The purpose of this is so that consultants (i.e., me), can investigate database performance issues without direct access to a full sized server. It is only necessary to have the characteristics of a proper database server, rather than be an exact replica. Unfortunately, the commercially available laptops do not support the desired configuration,...(read more)

Oracle Index Skip Scan

2011-06-13T03:55:00Z

There is a feature, called index skip scan that has been in Oracle since version 9i. When I across this, it seemed like a very clever trick, but not a critical capability. More recently, I have been advocating DW on SSD in approrpiate situations, and I am thinking this is now a valuable feature in keeping the number of nonclustered indexes to a minimum. Briefly, suppose we have an index with key columns: Col1 , Col2 , in that order. Obviously, a query with a search argument (SARG) on Col1 can use...(read more)

Intel Xeon E7 (Westmere-EX) and Sandy Bridge comments

2011-04-13T18:00:00Z

Last week Intel announced the 10-core Xeon E7-x8xx series (Westmere-EX), superceding the Xeon 6500 and 7500 series (Nehalem-EX). The E7 group consists of the E7-8800 series for 8-way systems, the E7-4800 series for 4-way systems and the E7-2800 series for 2-way systems. Also, the E3-12xx series (Sandy Bridge) for 1-socket servers, superceding the Xeon 3000 series (Nehalem and Westmere). This week at Intel Developer Forum Bejing, Intel has a slidedeck on Sandy Bridge-EP, an 8-core die that will presumably...(read more)

New Seagate SSD and Hard Disks

2011-03-16T01:53:00Z

Seagate today announced a near complete overhaul of their enterprise product line. This include second generation SSD now with either SAS and SATA interfaces. The first generation Pulsar SSD only supported SATA interface. The new 2.5in 15K and 10K hard drive models have higher capacity. The 2.5in 7.2K hard drive was upgraded to 1TB last month? The 7.2K 3.5in is now available upto 3TB. All models support 6Gbps. Pulsar SSD (SAS/SATA interface, 2.5in FF) The new second generation Seagate Pulsar SSD...(read more)

HP ProLiant DL980-Oracle TPC-C Benchmark spat

2011-03-12T04:39:00Z

The Register reported a spat between HP and Oracle on the TPC-C benchmark. Per above, HP submitted a TPC-C result of 3,388,535 tpm-C for their ProLiant DL980 G7 (8 Xeon X7560 processors), with a cost of $0.63 per tpm-C. Oracle has refused permission to publish. Late last year (2010) Oracle published a result of 30M tpm-C for a 108 processors (sockets) SPARC cluster ($30M complete system cost). Oracle is now comparing this to the HP Superdome result from 2007 of 4M tpm-C at $2.93 per tpm-C, calling...(read more)

Parallel Data Warehouse

2011-03-10T18:58:00Z

The Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse diagram was somewhat difficult to understand in terms of the functionality of each subsystem in relation to the configuration of its components. So now that HP has provided a detailed list of the PDW components , the diagram below shows the PDW subsystems with component configuration (InfiniBand, FC, and network connections not shown). Observe that there are three different ProLiant server models, the DL360 G7, DL370 G6 and the DL380 G7, in five different configurations...(read more)

IBM System x3850 X5 TPC-H Benchmark

2011-03-04T21:04:00Z

IBM just published a TPC-H SF 1000 result for their x3850 X5 , 4-way Xeon 7560 system featuring a special MAX5 memory expansion board to support 1.5TB memory. In Dec 2010, IBM also published a TPC-H SF1000 for their Power 780 system, 8-way, quad-core, (4 logical processors per physical core). The figure table below shows TPC-H SF 1000 results for the 8-way 6-core Opteron 8439 on SQL Server and Sybase, the 16-way quad-core Itanium 9350 on Oracle, the 4-way Xeon 7560 on SQL Server and the 8-way POWER7...(read more)

Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 Reference Guide

2011-02-24T13:48:00Z

Microsoft just release Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 Reference Guide version. The new changes are increased memory recommendation and the disks per RAID group change from 2-disk RAID 1 to 4-Disk RAID 10. Memory The earlier FTDW reference architecture cited 4GB memory per core. There was no rational behind this, but it was felt some rule was better than no rule. The new FTDW RG correctly cites the rational that more memory helps keep hash join intermediate results and sort operations in memory. 4-Disk...(read more)

Columnar Databases

2011-02-14T14:24:00Z

Ingres just published a TPC-H benchmark for VectorWise , an analytic database technology employing 1) SIMD processing (Intel SSE 4.2), 2) better memory optimizations to leverage on-chip cache, 3) compression, 4) Column-based storage. Ingres originated as a research project at UC Berkeley (see Wikipedia ) in the 1970s, and has since become a commercially supported, open source database system. Apparently, Ingres project people later founded Sybase. So Ingres in a sense, is the grandfather (or perhap...(read more)