My reaction was ''Wow!'', when I first saw the test results. I had to triple check the results and repeat the tests several more times in random order to make sure that I didn't make a mistake and that the results weren't a fluke. Good news is that the results are highly reproducible! The results I'm excited about are from the tests I conducted ...

SQL Server 2005 supports placing read-only filegroups or read-only databases on NTFS compression. In other words, you can compress the database files in a read-only filegroup or a read-only database. This can be a very useful feature if saving disk storage is of high priority. But what are the performance implications of using this SQL Server ...

In Windows Server 2003, you can use the Disk Management console to create a striped volume over multiple dynamic disks (well, you can also create a mirrored, a RAID-5 volume, etc). If these disks (or LUNs) are presented from a SAN, most likely you can stripe across the same storage devices--making up these LUNs--inside the SAN to present ...

Whether you are load testing SQL Server or evaluating the I/O performance of a storage subsystem, you need to make sure that you cover the entire spectrum of the load levels--from light and moderate all the way to heavy and saturated--before you draw any conclusion. This is especially important when you are doing performance comparison. Relying on ...

RAID 5 is a dirty word in the DBA community and beyond. There are websites devoted to trash RAID 5. I've seen DBAs declaring performance root cause found the very moment they found out that some database files were placed on RAID 5 volumes. You'd be ridiculed and run out of town if you dare to suggest putting the transaction log file on RAID ...

Just google for Windows disk alignment best practice, and you would find thousands of articles, whitepapers, and posts, all preaching the practice of aligning disk partitions on the 64K boundary. For instance, one of the EMC recommendations prescribes a disk alignment value of 64K for the host file systems when deploying SQL Server 2005. Microsoft ...

Whenever this question comes up, my typical response is to pass along the following Microsoft recommendations: The number of data files within a single filegroup should equal to the number of CPU cores. See the ''Physical Database Storage Design'' whitepaper. Lining up the number of data files with CPU’s has scalability advantages for ...