Storage has changed dramatically over the last three years driven by SSD developments. Most of the key components necessary for a powerful storage system are available and the cost is highly favorable for direct placement of data files. Some additional infrastructure elements could greatly enhance the flexibility of storage systems with ...

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 ...

Over weekend I was looking at various RAID controller documents to update my material on storage performance, and I came across three items that were good for a hoot. Direct IO, not Cached IO The LSI slidedeck MegaRAID Performance Tuning and Benchmark Tips states that Direct IO is the correct setting on RAID controllers. ''All read data ...

Just a heads up to those in the area that I will be speaking at the (TriPASS) Raleigh SQL Server user group on the 15th of June 2010. The topic is Storage & I/O Best Practices. The abstract is listed below: SQL Server relies heavily on a well configured storage sub-system to perform at its peak but unfortunately this is one of the most ...

While reading through the documentation for the HP Storage Works 2000 MSA, I found the following performance numbers cited in the quickspecs for both the FC and SAS versions. The 2000fc version cited performance numbers for the fc (Fiber Channel), sa (SAS) and i (iSCSI) models. The 2000sa version only cites SAS results. The MSA 2000 Technical ...

A recently published TPC-H benchmark result, along with previously published results provide some insight into to the relative impact of SSD to disk drives, and SSD versus system memory. The TPC-H configurations are shown below. All results are at SF 100. The first two are on Windows Server 2003 sp1, and SQL Server 2005 sp1 and sp2 ...

In this previous post I asked whether 100% logical scan fragmentation is always worse than 85% local scan fragmentation for table/index scans. (To be precise, I was talking about a B-tree table, i.e. a table with a clustered index).   The answer is no. 100% logical scan fragmentation is not always worse than 85% logical scan fragmentation ...

For several months, we have seen ads for the joint HP/Oracle RAC and Exadata storage combination talking about extreme performance (10X faster) for large data warehouses. One thing I like about Oracle is that they have courage to pursue technology with deep hardware design implications, even if it takes several iterations to iron out the major ...

All the previously posted results (May 25th and May 29th) on this exercise were obtained with query parallelism disabled (i.e. the sp_configure ‘max degree of parallelism’ option was set to 1).   Since the following test query is sensitive to query parallelism, we need to see what impact query parallelism may have.   DBCC ...

This is another follow-up on the T-SQL exercise.   So the test query below is rather simple:   DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS go SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.test;   But beneath its simple appearance, many factors are at play and interact in a complex way to influence the query performance. In other words, trying to predict its ...