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  • My blog has now moved to http://dataidol.com/tonyrogerson

    - by tonyrogerson
    I've decided to implement a new blogging infrastructure based on WordPress; the community server stuff I'm using has got a bit tired and WordPress offers a wealth of plug-ins to do pretty much everything I want.So, see http://dataidol.com/tonyrogerson for my new blog; its not just a move, I have broadened my coverage to encompass all things data, the first couple of posts talk about Short-Stroking hard disks (something I've presented on a number of times now), I've also got some Erlang content.Anyway, enjoy!T

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  • Event on SQL Server 2008 Disk IO and the new Complex Event Processing (StreamInsight) feature in R2

    - by tonyrogerson
    Allan Mitchell and myself are doing a double act, Allan is becoming one of the leading guys in the UK on StreamInsight and will give an introduction to this new exciting technology; on top of that I'll being talking about SQL Server Disk IO - well, "Disk" might not be relevant anymore because I'll be talking about SSD and IOFusion - basically I'll be talking about the underpinnings - making sure you understand and get it right, how to monitor etc... If you've any specific problems or questions just ping me an email [email protected]. To register for the event see: http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/217/SQL-Server-and-Disk-IO-File-GroupsFiles-SSDs-FusionIO-InRAM-DBs-Fragmentation-Tony-Rogerson-Complex-Event-Processing-Allan-Mitchell.aspx 18:15 SQL Server and Disk IOTony Rogerson, SQL Server MVPTony's Blog; Tony on TwitterIn this session Tony will talk about RAID levels, how SQL server writes to and reads from disk, the effect SSD has and will talk about other options for throughput enhancement like Fusion IO. He will look at the effect fragmentation has and how to minimise the impact, he will look at the File structure of a database and talk about what benefits multiple files and file groups bring. We will also touch on Database Mirroring and the effect that has on throughput, how to get a feeling for the throughput you should expect.19:15 Break19:45 Complex Event Processing (CEP)Allan Mitchell, SQL Server MVPhttp://sqlis.com/sqlisStreamInsight is Microsoft’s first foray into the world of Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP).  In this session I want to show an introduction to this technology.  I will show how and why it is useful.  I will get us used to some new terminology but best of all I will show just how easy it is to start building your first CEP/ESP application.

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  • Relational Database pioneer Chris Date is giving a seminar 13th/14th May Edinburgh on "SQL and Relat

    - by tonyrogerson
    One of the pioneers of the Relational Database, Chris Date is giving a 2 day seminar in Edinburgh (13th and 14th May 2010) based around his new book "SQL and Relational Theory - How to Write Accurate SQL Code" which if you don't already have I'd say is a must buy. When I first saw this and what he will cover I thought, oh yer - this is going to cost the earth, well it doesn't - its £750 for the two days and there are discounts available for multiple bookings, being a member...(read more)

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  • Tuesday 6th Manchester SQL User Group - Chris Testa-O'Neil (Loading a datawarehouse using SSIS) and

    - by tonyrogerson
    Chris will give a talk on Loading a datawarehouse using SQL Server Integration Services, Tony Rogerson will give a talk on Database Design: Normalisation/Denormalisation and using Surrogate Keys - practicalities/pitfalls and benefits in Microsoft SQL Server. Registration is essential which you can do here: http://sqlserverfaq.com?eid=218 . Come and join us for an evening of SQL Server discussion, as well as the two formal sessions by Chris Testa-O'Neil and Tony Rogerson there will be a chance...(read more)

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  • Cost justification for buying a 32GB superfast Alienware M18x with a price tag of around £5K ($10K)

    - by tonyrogerson
    When considering buying a laptop that’s going to cost me around £5,000 I really need to justify the purchase from a business perspective; my Lenovo W700 has served me very well for the last 2 years, it’s an extremely good machine and as solid as a rock (and as heavy), alas though it is limited to the 8GB. As SQL Server 2012 approaches and with my interest in working in the Business Intelligence space over the next year or two it is clear I need a powerful machine that I can run a full infrastructure though virtualised. My requirements For High Availability / Disaster Recovery research and demonstration Machine for a domain controller Four machines in a shared disk cluster (SQL Server Clustering active – active etc.) Five  machines in a file share cluster (SQL Server Availability Groups) For Business Intelligence research and demonstration Not entirely sure how many machine I want to run here, but it would be to cover the entire BI stack in an enterprise setting, sharepoint, sql server etc. For Big Data Research I have a fondness for the NoSQL approach to scalability and dealing with large volumes so I need a number of machines to research VoltDB, Hadoop etc. As you can see the requirements for a SQL Server consultant to service their clients well is considerable; will 8GB suffice, alas no, it will no longer do. I’m a very strong believer that in order to do your job well you must expense it, short cuts only cost you time, waiting 5 minutes instead of an hour for something to run not only saves me time but my clients time, I can do things quicker and more importantly I can demonstrate concepts. My W700 with the 8GB of RAM and SSD’s cost me around £3.5K two years ago, to be honest I’ve not got the full use I wanted out of it but the machine has had the power when I’ve needed it, it’s served me and my clients well. Alienware now do a model (the M18x) with 32GB of RAM; yes 32GB in a laptop! Dual drives so I can whack a couple of really good SSD’s in there, a quad core with hyper threading i7 and a decent speed. I can reduce the cost of the memory by getting it from Crucial, so instead of £1.5K for 32GB it will be around £900, I can also cost save on the SSD as well. The beauty about the M18x is that it is USB3.0, SATA 3 and also really importantly has eSATA, running VM’s will never be easier, I can have a removeable SSD with my VM’s on it and can plug it into my home machine or laptop – an ideal world! The initial outlay of £5K is peanuts compared to the benefits I’ll give my clients, I will be able to present real enterprise concepts, I’ll also be able to give training on those real enterprise concepts and with real, albeit virtualised machines.

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  • Deck from London UG 20110616 - Building a Reporting Brick capable of 1.2GBytes/sec and 80K IOs/sec for less than £2K

    - by tonyrogerson
    The Reporting Brick concept is not really anything new, it starts the walk toward bringing the work Jim Gray and Tom Barclay et al did on CyberBricks up-to-date in terms of current kit. A reporting brick is simply a box built from commodity kit utilising commodity SSD, namely the OCZ IBIS drives to gain extremely high levels of performance for a fraction of the cost required for typical server and san installs today. I'll write up over the next few months as I work further on the concept, for now the deck attached summarises some of the ideas around it, the deck was presented at last nights London SQL Server User Group, I will be presenting it again in Edinburgh on the 29th June and other locations later in the year. Deck: Commodity Kit.pptx  

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  • Cuppa Corner talk "A trip to First Normal Form" available - Domains, Functional Dependencies, Repeat

    - by tonyrogerson
    It's 15 minutes, I talk about Domains, Functional Dependencies, Repeating Groups, Relational Valued Attributes and of course First Normal Form. http://sqlcontent.sqlblogcasts.com/video/cctr20100507dbdesign1nf/cctr20100507dbdesign1nf.html For questions just ask on the http://sqlserverfaq.com chat control or Twitter using #sqlfaq tag. Slides are also availble here: http://sqlcontent.sqlblogcasts.com/video/cctr20100507dbdesign1nf/cc_tr20100507_dbdesign1nf.pptx...(read more)

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  • Edinburgh this Thurs (25th) - Rob Carrol talks about how to build a high performance, scalable repor

    - by tonyrogerson
    Scottish Area SQL Server User Group Meeting, Edinburgh - Thursday 25th March An evening of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Scalability and Performance with Rob Carrol, see how to build a high performance, scalable reporting platform and the tuning techniques required to ensure that report performance remains optimal as your platform grows. Pizza and drinks will be provided! Register at http://www.sqlserverfaq.com/events/221/SQL-Server-2008-Reporting-Services-Scalability-and-Performance.aspx...(read more)

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  • SQL Windowing screencast session for Cuppa Corner - rolling totals, data cleansing

    - by tonyrogerson
    In this 10 minute screencast I go through the basics of what I term windowing, which is basically the technique of filtering to a set of rows given a specific value, for instance a Sub-Query that aggregates or a join that returns more than just one row (for instance on a one to one relationship). http://sqlserverfaq.com/content/SQL-Basic-Windowing-using-Joins.aspx SQL below... USE tempdb go CREATE TABLE RollingTotals_Nesting ( client_id int not null, transaction_date date not null, transaction_amount...(read more)

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  • You do not need a separate SQL Server license for a Standby or Passive server - this Microsoft White Paper explains all

    - by tonyrogerson
    If you were in any doubt at all that you need to license Standby / Passive Failover servers then the White Paper “Do Not Pay Too Much for Your Database Licensing” will settle those doubts. I’ve had debate before people thinking you can only have a single instance as a standby machine, that’s just wrong; it would mean you could have a scenario where you had a 2 node active/passive cluster with database mirroring and log shipping (a total of 4 SQL Server instances) – in that set up you only need to buy one physical license so long as the standby nodes have the same or less physical processors (cores are irrelevant). So next time your supplier suggests you need a license for your standby box tell them you don’t and educate them by pointing them to the white paper. For clarity I’ve copied the extract below from the White Paper. Extract from “Do Not Pay Too Much for Your Database Licensing” Standby Server Customers often implement standby server to make sure the application continues to function in case primary server fails. Standby server continuously receives updates from the primary server and will take over the role of primary server in case of failure in the primary server. Following are comparisons of how each vendor supports standby server licensing. SQL Server Customers does not need to license standby (or passive) server provided that the number of processors in the standby server is equal or less than those in the active server. Oracle DB Oracle requires customer to fully license both active and standby servers even though the standby server is essentially idle most of the time. IBM DB2 IBM licensing on standby server is quite complicated and is different for every editions of DB2. For Enterprise Edition, a minimum of 100 PVUs or 25 Authorized User is needed to license standby server.   The following graph compares prices based on a database application with two processors (dual-core) and 25 users with one standby server. [chart snipped]  Note   All prices are based on newest Intel Xeon Nehalem processor database pricing for purchases within the United States and are in United States dollars. Pricing is based on information available on vendor Web sites for Enterprise Edition. Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition 25 users (CALs) x $164 / CAL + $8,592 / Server = $12,692 (no need to license standby server) Oracle Enterprise Edition (base license without options) Named User Plus minimum (25 Named Users Plus per Core) = 25 x 2 = 50 Named Users Plus x $950 / Named Users Plus x 2 servers = $95,000 IBM DB2 Enterprise Edition (base license without feature pack) Need to purchase 125 Authorized User (400 PVUs/100 PVUs = 4 X 25 = 100 Authorized User + 25 Authorized Users for standby server) = 125 Authorized Users x $1,040 / Authorized Users = $130,000  

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  • SQL User Group Events coming - Cambridge, Leeds, Manchester and Edinburgh

    - by tonyrogerson
    Neil Hambly and myself are presenting next week in Cambridge, Neil will be showing us how to use tools at hand to determine the current activity on your database servers and I'll be doing a talk around Disaster Recovery and High Availability and the options we have at hand.The User Group is growing in size and spread, there is a Southampton event planned for the 9th Dec - make sure you keep your eyes peeled for more details - the best place is the UK SQL Server User Group LinkedIn area.Want removing from this email list? Then just reply with remove please on the subject line.Cambridge SQL UG - 25th Nov, EveningEvening Meeting, More info and registerNeil Hambly on Determining the current activity of your Database Servers, Product demo from Red-Gate, Tony Rogerson on HA/DR/Scalability(Backup/Recovery options - clustering, mirroring, log shipping; scaling considerations etc.)Leeds SQL UG - 8th Dec, EveningEvening Meeting, More info and registerNeil Hambly will be talking about Index Views and Computed Columns for Performance, Tony Rogerson will be showing some advanced T-SQL techniques.Manchester SQL UG - 9th Dec, EveningEvening Meeting, More info and registerEnd of year wrap up, networking, drinks, some discussions - more info to follow soon.Edinburgh SQL UG - 9th Dec, EveningEvening Meeting, More info and registerSatya Jayanty will give an X factor for a DBAs life and Tony Rogerson will talk about SQL Server internals.Many thanks,Tony Rogerson, SQL Server MVPUK SQL Server User Grouphttp://sqlserverfaq.com

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  • SQLUG Events - London/Edinburgh/Cardiff/Reading - Masterclass, NoSQL, TSQL Gotcha's, Replication, BI

    - by tonyrogerson
    We have acquired two additional tickets to attend the SQL Server Master Class with Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp next Thurs (17th June), for a chance to win these coveted tickets email us ([email protected]) before 9pm this Sunday with the subject "MasterClass" - people previously entered need not worry - your still in with a chance. The winners will be announced Monday morning.As ever plenty going on physically, we've got dates for a stack of events in Manchester and Leeds, I'm looking at Birmingham if anybody has ideas? We are growing our online community with the Cuppa Corner section, to participate online remember to use the #sqlfaq twitter tag; for those wanting to get more involved in presenting and fancy trying it out we are always after people to do 1 - 5 minute SQL nuggets or Cuppa Corners (short presentations) at any of these User Group events - just email us [email protected] removing from this email list? Then just reply with remove please on the subject line.Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal Master Class - Thurs, 17th June - LondonREGISTER NOW AND GET A SECOND REGISTRATION FREE*The top things YOU need to know about managing SQL Server - in one place, on one day - presented by two of the best SQL Server industry trainers!This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance.The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will:>> Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour >> Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data >> Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database >> Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, LondonWhen: Thursday 17th June 2010*REGISTER TODAY AT www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql on the registration form simply quote discount code: BOGOF for both yourself and your colleague and you will save 50% off each registration – that’s a 249 GBP saving! This offer is limited, book early to avoid disappointment.Wed, 23 JunREADINGEvening Meeting, More info and registerIntroduction to NoSQL (Not Only SQL) - Gavin Payne; T-SQL Gotcha's and how to avoid them - Ashwani Roy; Introduction to Recency Frequency - Tony Rogerson; Reporting Services - Tim LeungThu, 24 JunCARDIFFEvening Meeting, More info and registerAlex Whittles of Purple Frog Systems talks about Data warehouse design case studies, Other BI related session TBC Mon, 28 JunEDINBURGHEvening Meeting, More info and registerReplication (Components, Adminstration, Performance and Troubleshooting) - Neil Hambly Server Upgrades (Notes and Best practice from the field) - Satya Jayanty Wed, 14 JulLONDONEvening Meeting, More info and registerMeeting is being sponsored by DBSophic (http://www.dbsophic.com/download), database optimisation software. Physical Join Operators in SQL Server - Ami LevinWorkload Tuning - Ami LevinSQL Server and Disk IO (File Groups/Files, SSD's, Fusion-IO, In-RAM DB's, Fragmentation) - Tony RogersonComplex Event Processing - Allan MitchellMany thanks,Tony Rogerson, SQL Server MVPUK SQL Server User Grouphttp://sqlserverfaq.com"

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  • What is Granularity?

    - by tonyrogerson
    Granularity defines “the lowest level of detail”; but what is meant by “the lowest level of detail”? Consider the Transactions table below: create table Transactions ( TransactionID int not null primary key clustered, TransactionDate date not null, ClientID int not null, StockID int not null, TransactionAmount decimal ( 28 , 2 ) not null, CommissionAmount decimal ( 28 , 5 ) not null ) A Client can Trade in one or many Stocks on any date – there is no uniqueness to ClientID, Stock and TransactionDate...(read more)

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  • The enterprise vendor con - connecting SSD's using SATA 2 (3Gbits) thus limiting there performance

    - by tonyrogerson
    When comparing SSD against Hard drive performance it really makes me cross when folk think comparing an array of SSD running on 3GBits/sec to hard drives running on 6GBits/second is somehow valid. In a paper from DELL (http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/PowerEdge-PowerVaultH800-CacheCade-final.pdf) on increasing database performance using the DELL PERC H800 with Solid State Drives they compare four SSD drives connected at 3Gbits/sec against ten 10Krpm drives connected at 6Gbits [Tony slaps forehead while shouting DOH!]. It is true in the case of hard drives it probably doesn’t make much difference 3Gbit or 6Gbit because SAS and SATA are both end to end protocols rather than shared bus architecture like SCSI, so the hard drive doesn’t share bandwidth and probably can’t get near the 600MiBytes/second throughput that 6Gbit gives unless you are doing contiguous reads, in my own tests on a single 15Krpm SAS disk using IOMeter (8 worker threads, queue depth of 16 with a stripe size of 64KiB, an 8KiB transfer size on a drive formatted with an allocation size of 8KiB for a 100% sequential read test) I only get 347MiBytes per second sustained throughput at an average latency of 2.87ms per IO equating to 44.5K IOps, ok, if that was 3GBits it would be less – around 280MiBytes per second, oh, but wait a minute [...fingers tap desk] You’ll struggle to find in the commodity space an SSD that doesn’t have the SATA 3 (6GBits) interface, SSD’s are fast not only low latency and high IOps but they also offer a very large sustained transfer rate, consider the OCZ Agility 3 it so happens that in my masters dissertation I did the same test but on a difference box, I got 374MiBytes per second at an average latency of 2.67ms per IO equating to 47.9K IOps – cost of an 240GB Agility 3 is £174.24 (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/240gb-ocz-agility-3-ssd-25-sata-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-500mb-s-85k-iops), but that same drive set in a box connected with SATA 2 (3Gbits) would only yield around 280MiBytes per second thus losing almost 100MiBytes per second throughput and a ton of IOps too. So why the hell are “enterprise” vendors still only connecting SSD’s at 3GBits? Well, my conspiracy states that they have no interest in you moving to SSD because they’ll lose so much money, the argument that they use SATA 2 doesn’t wash, SATA 3 has been out for some time now and all the commodity stuff you buy uses it now. Consider the cost, not in terms of price per GB but price per IOps, SSD absolutely thrash Hard Drives on that, it was true that the opposite was also true that Hard Drives thrashed SSD’s on price per GB, but is that true now, I’m not so sure – a 300GByte 2.5” 15Krpm SAS drive costs £329.76 ex VAT (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/300gb-seagate-st9300653ss-savvio-15k3-25-hdd-sas-6gb-s-15000rpm-64mb-cache-27ms) which equates to £1.09 per GB compared to a 480GB OCZ Agility 3 costing £422.10 ex VAT (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/480gb-ocz-agility-3-ssd-25-sata-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-410mb-s-30k-iops) which equates to £0.88 per GB. Ok, I compared an “enterprise” hard drive with a “commodity” SSD, ok, so things get a little more complicated here, most “enterprise” SSD’s are SLC and most commodity are MLC, SLC gives more performance and wear, I’ll talk about that another day. For now though, don’t get sucked in by vendor marketing, SATA 2 (3Gbit) just doesn’t cut it, SSD need 6Gbit to breath and even that SSD’s are pushing. Alas, SSD’s are connected using SATA so all the controllers I’ve seen thus far from HP and DELL only do SATA 2 – deliberate? Well, I’ll let you decide on that one.

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  • Post SQL 2008 R2 Launch Thurs 15th London - UK SQL Server User Group is having a Social Event @ the

    - by tonyrogerson
    The UK SQL Server User Group is organising a Social event for SQL and SQL Server professionals, the event will be held after the SQL Server 2008 R2 launch event and is a short walk from that venue. See site for more information: http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/222/Social-for-SQL-and-SQL-Server-professionals-SQL-quiz-meet-your-peers-ask-the-group-Q-A.aspx We are putting some light bites on, if you are coming then do let us know through the site. Neil Hambly who is the London UK SQL Server User Group...(read more)

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  • Database Design - Surrogate keys: Part 1 of many (Rules for Surrogate Keys, E. F. Codd and C J Date

    - by tonyrogerson
    I started writing an article for my blog on surrogate keys drawing in the original research by E F Codd and C J Date, its getting a bit big :) so I'm going to chop it up into a number of posts over the coming weeks depending on my time. I'm interested in your thoughts and if you disagree please let me know but more importantly give me references back to papers stating why you take that position. Hope it makes sense. Surrogate keys There are two factions in the world of Database Design that...(read more)

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  • Sets, Surrogates, Normalisation, Referential Integrity - the Theory with example Scaling considerati

    - by tonyrogerson
    The Slides and Demo's for the SQLBits session I did today at SQL Bits in London are attached. The Agenda was... Thinking in Sets Surrogate Keys ú What they are ú Comparison NEWID, NEWSEQUENTIALID, IDENTITY ú Fragmenation Normalisation ú An introduction – what is it? Why use it? ú Joins – Pre-filter problems, index intersection ú Fragmentation again Referential Integrity ú Optimiser -> Query rewrite ú Locking considerations around Foreign Keys and Declarative RI (using Triggers)...(read more)

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  • Cost Comparison Hard Disk Drive to Solid State Drive on Price per Gigabyte - dispelling a myth!

    - by tonyrogerson
    It is often said that Hard Disk Drive storage is significantly cheaper per GiByte than Solid State Devices – this is wholly inaccurate within the database space. People need to look at the cost of the complete solution and not just a single component part in isolation to what is really required to meet the business requirement. Buying a single Hitachi Ultrastar 600GB 3.5” SAS 15Krpm hard disk drive will cost approximately £239.60 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012) compared to an OCZ 600GB Z-Drive R4 CM84 PCIe costing £2,316.54 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012); I’ve not included FusionIO ioDrive because there is no public pricing available for it – something I never understand and personally when companies do this I immediately think what are they hiding, luckily in FusionIO’s case the product is proven though is expensive compared to OCZ enterprise offerings. On the face of it the single 15Krpm hard disk has a price per GB of £0.39, the SSD £3.86; this is what you will see in the press and this is what sales people will use in comparing the two technologies – do not be fooled by this bullshit people! What is the requirement? The requirement is the database will have a static size of 400GB kept static through archiving so growth and trim will balance the database size, the client requires resilience, there will be several hundred call centre staff querying the database where queries will read a small amount of data but there will be no hot spot in the data so the randomness will come across the entire 400GB of the database, estimates predict that the IOps required will be approximately 4,000IOps at peak times, because it’s a call centre system the IO latency is important and must remain below 5ms per IO. The balance between read and write is 70% read, 30% write. The requirement is now defined and we have three of the most important pieces of the puzzle – space required, estimated IOps and maximum latency per IO. Something to consider with regard SQL Server; write activity requires synchronous IO to the storage media specifically the transaction log; that means the write thread will wait until the IO is completed and hardened off until the thread can continue execution, the requirement has stated that 30% of the system activity will be write so we can expect a high amount of synchronous activity. The hardware solution needs to be defined; two possible solutions: hard disk or solid state based; the real question now is how many hard disks are required to achieve the IO throughput, the latency and resilience, ditto for the solid state. Hard Drive solution On a test on an HP DL380, P410i controller using IOMeter against a single 15Krpm 146GB SAS drive, the throughput given on a transfer size of 8KiB against a 40GiB file on a freshly formatted disk where the partition is the only partition on the disk thus the 40GiB file is on the outer edge of the drive so more sectors can be read before head movement is required: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 3,733 IOps at an average latency of 34.06ms (34 MiB/s). The same test was done on the same disk but the test file was 130GiB: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 528 IOps at an average latency of 217.49ms (4 MiB/s). From the result it is clear random performance gets worse as the disk fills up – I’m currently writing an article on short stroking which will cover this in detail. Given the work load is random in nature looking at the random performance of the single drive when only 40 GiB of the 146 GB is used gives near the IOps required but the latency is way out. Luckily I have tested 6 x 15Krpm 146GB SAS 15Krpm drives in a RAID 0 using the same test methodology, for the same test above on a 130 GiB for each drive added the performance boost is near linear, for each drive added throughput goes up by 5 MiB/sec, IOps by 700 IOps and latency reducing nearly 50% per drive added (172 ms, 94 ms, 65 ms, 47 ms, 37 ms, 30 ms). This is because the same 130GiB is spread out more as you add drives 130 / 1, 130 / 2, 130 / 3 etc. so implicit short stroking is occurring because there is less file on each drive so less head movement required. The best latency is still 30 ms but we have the IOps required now, but that’s on a 130GiB file and not the 400GiB we need. Some reality check here: a) the drive randomness is more likely to be 50/50 and not a full 100% but the above has highlighted the effect randomness has on the drive and the more a drive fills with data the worse the effect. For argument sake let us assume that for the given workload we need 8 disks to do the job, for resilience reasons we will need 16 because we need to RAID 1+0 them in order to get the throughput and the resilience, RAID 5 would degrade performance. Cost for hard drives: 16 x £239.60 = £3,833.60 For the hard drives we will need disk controllers and a separate external disk array because the likelihood is that the server itself won’t take the drives, a quick spec off DELL for a PowerVault MD1220 which gives the dual pathing with 16 disks 146GB 15Krpm 2.5” disks is priced at £7,438.00, note its probably more once we had two controller cards to sit in the server in, racking etc. Minimum cost taking the DELL quote as an example is therefore: {Cost of Hardware} / {Storage Required} £7,438.60 / 400 = £18.595 per GB £18.59 per GiB is a far cry from the £0.39 we had been told by the salesman and the myth. Yes, the storage array is composed of 16 x 146 disks in RAID 10 (therefore 8 usable) giving an effective usable storage availability of 1168GB but the actual storage requirement is only 400 and the extra disks have had to be purchased to get the  IOps up. Solid State Drive solution A single card significantly exceeds the IOps and latency required, for resilience two will be required. ( £2,316.54 * 2 ) / 400 = £11.58 per GB With the SSD solution only two PCIe sockets are required, no external disk units, no additional controllers, no redundant controllers etc. Conclusion I hope by showing you an example that the myth that hard disk drives are cheaper per GiB than Solid State has now been dispelled - £11.58 per GB for SSD compared to £18.59 for Hard Disk. I’ve not even touched on the running costs, compare the costs of running 18 hard disks, that’s a lot of heat and power compared to two PCIe cards!Just a quick note: I've left a fair amount of information out due to this being a blog! If in doubt, email me :)I'll also deal with the myth that SSD's wear out at a later date as well - that's just way over done still, yes, 5 years ago, but now - no.

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  • This Wed, Reading - Service Broker, Indexing, Normalisation, Sets, RI and Locking, Surrogate Keys

    - by tonyrogerson
    Registration is a must so we know numbers and for security, register here: http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/213/Service-Broker-Intro-Guidance-Indexing-Selection-Usage-Fragmentation-etc-Normalisation-Surrogate-Keys-Locking-considerations.aspx Network, learn, ask a question, meet other folk, get fed - these are all things that happen at user group events. These events are a really great opportunity to socialise in an informal learning experience - if you want your own exposure then come and do a 1 -...(read more)

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  • London User Group Meetings this week (19th/20th May); 26th May-Agile Data Warehousing; 17th June-Kim

    - by tonyrogerson
    Got two user group meetings in London for you, we've also started the Cuppa Corner sessions - the first 3 are up on the site - A trip to First Normal Form, Lookup and Cache Transform in SSIS and Pipeline Limiter in SSIS - we are aiming for at least one per week. WhereScape are doing a breakfast meeting on Agile techniques to Data Warehousing and Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal are over in June for a 1 day master class. Finally a 3 day performance and monitoring workshop on 22- 24th June in London...(read more)

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  • Impressions of my ASUS eee slate EP121 - Dual core 4GB, 64GB SSD

    - by tonyrogerson
    This thing is lovely, very nice bluetooth keyboard that has nice feedback on the keypress, there is no mouse but you can use the stylus or get yourself a bluetooth mouse, me, I've opted for a Microsoft ARC mouse which is a delight to use, the USB doors are a pain to open for the first time if like me you don't have any finger nails. It came as a suprise that the slate shows four processors, Dual Core with multi-threading, I didn't really look at the processor I was more interested in the amount of memory and the SSD; you don't get the full 4GB even with the 64 bit version of Windows 7 installed (which I immediately upgraded to Ultimate through my MSDN subscription). The box is extremely responsive - extremely, it loads Winword in literally a second. I've got office 2010 and onenote 2010 on there now; one problem is that on applying all (43) windows updates since the upgrade the machine is still sat on step 3 of 3 on the start up configuring updates screen after about an hour, you can't turn this machine off without using a paper clip to reset it and as I have just found you need a paper clip :). Installing Windows 7 SP1 was effortless. One of the first things I did on it was to reduce the size of the font, by default its set at 125%, my eye sight is ok :) so I've set that back down. Amazon Kindle for the PC works really well, plenty of text on the screen when viewed portrait, the case it comes with also allows the slate to stand up in various positions - portrait, horizontal - seems stable enough. The wireless works well, seems to have a better signal than my other two laptop machines which is good news. The gadget passed the pose test at work :). I use offline files to keep a copy of all my work stuff locally, I'm not sure what it is, well, its probably my server but whenever I try and sync it runs for a couple of minutes then fails with network name no longer contactable, funnily enough its fine from my big laptop so I can only guess this may be a driver type issue on the EP121 itself - very odd and very annoying. I do a lot of presenting and need to plug into a VGA project because most sites that's all that is offered, the EP121 has a mini-hdmi output which is great except for this scenario, hdmi is digital, vga is analogue, you will struggle to find a cost effective solution, I found HDFury and also a device HP do, however, a better solution appears to be getting a USB graphics adapter for instance the one I've ordered is the ClimaxDigital USB 2.0 to DVI,VGA or HDMI Adaptor which gives everything I need - VGA and DVI output and great resolution as well - ok, so fingers crossed because I'm presenting next Wednesday in Edinburgh and not taking my 300kg lenovo w700 (I'm sure my back just sighed in relief) - it certainly works really well on my LED TV, the install was simple - it just works! One of the several reasons for buying this piece of kit was to use it on my LED TV to remote into my main machine to check stuff whilst sat in my living room, also to watch webcasts and lecture videos in comfort away from my office, because of the wireless speed and limitation I'm opting for a USB network adapter from Belkin - that will also allow me to take advantage of my home gigabit network, there are only 2 usb ports on the slate so I'm going to knock up a hub so connecting it in is straight forward and simple, I'm also going to purchase a second power supply so I don't have to faff about with that either.I now have the developer x64 edition of SQL Server 2008 R2, yes everything :) - about 16GB left to play with on the machine now but that will be fine, I'll put AdventureWorks on there so I can play and demo stuff which is all I'm after from this, my development machine is significantly more powerful and meets my storage needs too.Travel test this weekend and next week, I'm in Dundee for my final exam for the masters degree.

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