smarty pants.

;-)

For those trying to forecast ultimate limits to database performance, rather trying to make very difficult technical arguments, I will provide some simple advice for the majority of people who are on 4-socket systems or lower. Even for people of 4-socket quad core systems, i.e., a total of 16 cores, there is still significant headroom with existing SW. This is because whatever the big iron systems (64 sockets, 128 cores, 256 logical proc) can do today, 4 socket systems with 8-16 cores (plus core level improvements) will be able to do in 3-4 years. Of course for those of us on SQL Server, this depends on MS increasing max supported cores from 64 to 128 or better yet 256, and working out high scheduler issues that Oracle and IBM has had more experience (read pain) with. At least 8X headroom is available in OLTP type apps, and comparable in DW, based on TPC-C and TPC-H benchmarks.

It is clear we are well into the era where one cannot sit still on antiquated application architectures, relying completely on faster hardware for performance improvements. During the period when processor frequency shot up from 500MHz to 3GHz+, memory latency did not improve much, except on single socket AMD Opteron. Now we are in a period where single core performance is improving slowly, but the number of cores per socket will grow, probably doubling every 2 years, possible more if we step back to simpler in-order cores. This is where Linchi summary of Amdahl touches on.

The call to action is for MS to make parallel execution improvements in the SQL Server engine, and for ISVs to improve applications, getting rid of ancient serialized code to fully set oriented SQL. SQL Server 2000 had serious problems in parallel execution plans (PEP). Only really simple operations benefited from PEP. PEP was just as likely to cause degradation as improvements. Vast improvements with PEP were made in SQL 2005 mostly when all data is in memory. There are still a number of PEP issues when data must be fetched from disk. MS talked about alternative strategies for multi-threading disk IO at the last SQL Connections. Even MS does not have enough expertise in high performance storage to iron out these issues.

I would like to see SQL Server get a proper PEP for merge joins. In theory this should be possible, and even simple, but last I saw, SQL Server cannot do this.

A really big item would be if MS could figure out how to do PEP for writes. In complicated SQL, if triggers or constraints are involved, this might not be possible. But in some simpler situations, i.e., a data load or a full table column update with no triggers, this should be possible, considering writes are so CPU intensive.

very interesting post, your blog is always giving me things to think about !

Jchang....... u r a champ

you have given new dimention to my thoughts.....

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