Did you know that you can share read-only databases between several instances of SQL Server? Scalable Shared Databases is a very interesting SQL Server feature that many of us seem to almost have forgotten about it. Available for the first time in SQL Server 2005 and originally described on the Microsoft KB article 910378, it was later fully ...

At Intel Developer Forum 2009 last week, Microsoft disclosed significant advances in Windows Server 2008 R2 with the elimination of many locks, most prominently the Dispatch Scheduler lock, that impact the ability scale performance up to and beyond 64 cores. Look for the presentation: Microsoft & Intel Innovations in Hardware and Software to ...

To date, no 4-way or 8-way TPC-H data warehouse benchmark result has been published for the six-core Xeon X7460 and no TPC-C or TPC-E OLTP benchmark result has been published for six-core Opteron. Usually, the absence of published results means the results are not competitive, in one manner or another. TPC-C, E and H results were published for ...

Earlier I talked about the first TPC-C and TPC-E results for 2-way Nehalem, ie, the Intel Xeon 5500 series. The results were spectacular relative to the previous generation Xeon 5400 series, (2.5X gain on the Intel slide deck for database OLTP) and were pretty much hitting the same range as 4-way Xeon 7460. I pointed out ...

Yesterday Intel held a product announcement press event for the upcoming Nehalem EX, which will succeed the current Xeon 7400 series based on the Core 2 micro-architecture for ''expandable system'', i.e., 4-way and higher, in late 2009 or early 2010. The current Xeon 5500 series (also Nehalem architecture) has 4 cores, 8M shared L3, 2 QPI links, ...

It seems like every couple of months we see yet another post on SQLCLR string splitting routines. Many bloggers, I suppose, are still struggling, even three years later, to find that ''perfect'' use case for SQLCLR. Is string splitting it? Probably not. And with SQL Server 2008 table-valued parameters now available, SQLCLR string splitting has ...

I had been meaning to do a somewhat comprehensive review of SQL Server performance from versions 2000 to 2008 for both 32 and 64-bit on Data Warehouse type queries, with in depth examination of scaling in parallel execution plans.   For now, I can provide a short summary. The test platform is a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with 2 quad-core Xeon ...

Or the IBM x3950M2 8-way Quad-Core Xeon? Consider the following specs: 8-way Quad-Core Opteron (32 cores total) Max Memory: 512GB (64 DIMM sockets) 11 PCI-E slots: 3x16, 3x8, and 5x4 or option for 7 PCI-E and 2HTx   Compare this with the HP ProLiant DL585G5: 4-way Quad-Core Opteron (16 cores total) Max Memory: 256GB (32 DIMM ...