64-bit Rocks !

There are plenty of relatively beefy 32-bit servers still in production, and enterprises do not want to lose their hardware investment.  Dropping 32-bit support, while nice for those of us who have to work with the thing, would not be a good move politically...

That would eliminate in-place upgrades...  

In place upgrades are not always the best route, but Microsoft will want to allow this as it's the easiest option for small shops and therefore sells more upgrades.  You want the 'barrier to entry' set as low as possible.

In real world, we are still not in a position where 64-bit is a no-brainer choice, even on the performance consideration alone. For some workloads on some platforms, 32-bit still beats 64-bit. Testing and testing again before you commit to 64-bit would be my suggestion.

I was just considering doing the same thing on my D620, but was hesitant to make the leap.  Good to hear of someone who's done the same with good results.  

Does SSIS work on 64 bit? I mean the tools, or do you have to develop on 32 bit and deploy to 64 bit?

>>Therefore, most production upgrades to Katmai will take place in 2009.

Actually we are skipping 2005 (on some boxes) and going straight to SQL 2008

We were going to upgrade to 2005 in 2008 but since 2008 has the new date dataype (which will save me some bytes since our data goes back to pre 1900-01-01 and Idon't need the time portion for those billion rows)

Paul,

All I can say is, I'm glad you're not in charge of making this decision for the SQL Server team :)  I can think of a few of my clients who would absolutely not agree with your logic.

Paul,

How do your other applications that are 32-bit run?  Visual Studio and Office come to my mind.  Do they run OK under WOW?  I believe that Vista and SQL would run great, it is just all the other stuff that I am concerned about.

Just want to confirm Paul's experience - I've been running Vista 64 at home for a few months, no problems yet.  

Paul, is Vista recognizing the full 4GB? My D620 is only showing 3326MB with x64 ultimate loaded.  

My question is more around the Visual Studio 2005 and Office. So I got the confirmation on Office 2007, but would love to know experiences around Visual Studio. I will do some more searching.  I would love to go x64 on my laptop or even my desktop.

Thanks for the info Paul - I was a bit confused on that.  Now to get all my apps loaded and see how it runs...

I agree that 64-bit is the way to go for any serious, new deployment of SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008, mainly because of it's memory advantages. Pretty much any server CPU sold in the last two-three years supports x64, and Windows Server 2008 will be the last Server OS to support 32-bit.

Microsoft is pretty far into the Katmai dev cycle, so I don't see any advantage for them in dropping 32-bit for Katmai, but I think they should for Katmai +1.

>> Even with Vista 64 and 4Gb of RAM, only 3326Mb is usable. The rest is space needed for firmware, video, etc, just like in the 286 days when a machine with 1 Mb RAM could only see/use about 640Kb of that (or 712Mb if you really tweeked your machine).

Actually, that's not really true. When I first put 4GB in my Vista 64 machine it only showed 3326MB available, but after a little digging I found that by enabling "Hardware Memory Hole" in my BIOS that Vista was able to see the whole 4GB.

Hope this helps

Paul or Andy,

Have you guys found a fix for the 3326MB usable ram limit on your d620? I'm thinking of upgrading to vista64 and 4 gigs too but really want the entire 4 gigs of ram usable. I use photoshop extensively and need to squeeze every bit of ram out as possible. Does Jonathan's suggestion of Hardware Memory Hole work? Thanks guys.

I'm trying to install Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition on my Dell D620 but it won't even start up off the Windows Installation CD.  When I put the CD in the drive and try to open in I get the following message:

D:\ is not a valid Win32 application.

Am I missing something?  Do I need to update drivers or BIOS to install 64bit OS?