Intel released the Nehalem processor family. The Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series family. This could be the nail in the coffin for AMD. I hope not. Without competition, Intel can rest on its laurels.
Lets look at the goodies. On Glenn Berry’s blog, he points out the SQL specific benchmarks. This comes from the Anandtech benchmarks. This is what caught my eye from that review.
The memory controller has up to three channels. A dual CPU configuration has access to 35GB/s of memory bandwidth (measured with stream) if you use DDR3-1333. The latest dual Opteron achieves 19.4GB/s with DDR2-800
Think about it. If you have a SQL box with 32GB of RAM and a VLDB, you could theoretically churn the buffer pool once every second. Of course, you will probably hit a disk bottleneck first. In addition the the proc specific improvements, DDR3 with NUMA support in a server is a huge leap.
Today, HP also introduced the DL3X0 G6. Here is a link to the the DL 360 G6 specs. I am speculating but I bet it would beat a dual socket 6 core DL 580 G5. Most definitely on IO bound workloads like a database server. Hopefully, the DL580 G6’s are coming soon. Maybe an 8 socket DL 780 G6. :)
Mix that with VMWare ESX 4.0 that is in RC and virtualization of the database server may have come of age.
The Opteron 1up’ed Intel in 2004. Now the ball is back in AMD’s court. I am rooting for you!
Trying out a new tool from Chris Pirillo called Twickie. It basically lets you blog one of your tweets and all of the replies. It missed about half of the replies but it is a nice idea and hopefully it gets better.
I posed this question to my Twitter followers on a late Saturday afternoon. I was happy with the results. Keep in mind that most of my followers are Microsoft centric DBAs, developers, admins and general geeks. I will try this again with a different question Monday when my tweeps are paying more attention. Only the geekiest of geeks are perusing Twitter(or blogging) on Valentines' Day. See below ;)
Credit to Scoble for the idea.
I will post tips and tricks I have have learned running SQL Server on ESX tomorrow.
statisticsio: Hey you. Yes, you. Are you virtualizing your db server? In prod? How big is it? Pitfalls? Winfalls? ROI? Performance? Pro's\Con's?
edq @statisticsio we have several prod vms all have few simultaneous users LT 40ish so far so good mirroring on two vms difrnt farms works good2 Sat, Feb 14 17:40:00 from TwitterBerry
UndertheFold @statisticsio just inherited 72 servers almost all VM on ESX clusters including DW and some VLBs, seems to be working ok a lot are sql 2000 Sat, Feb 14 17:15:22 from TwitterBerry
mike_walsh @statisticsio biggest db is smaller, 75gb. Have worked with 150gb on windows virtual server (not hyper v) i/o reaked. Frustrations. Sat, Feb 14 16:29:28 from TwitterBerry
mike_walsh @statisticsio roi-rackspace/power/happier server team.. Perf-has been alright for med and dev/qa workloads. Nothing huge on vm yet. Sat, Feb 14 16:27:49 from TwitterBerry
Jorriss @statisticsio Virtual in Dev, Test, and Stage. Prod? No way. Never, never, never. Sat, Feb 14 16:28:27 from twhirl
mrdenny @statisticsio planning to VM smaller prod database. All dev and qa are vm. No issues yet. Sat, Feb 14 16:17:05 from TinyTwitter
jlshultz @statisticsio yes we r. Not big # users, but Oracle DB & Oracle Apps. Been vm ~3yrs, its been great. Time sync been only issue. Sat, Feb 14 16:16:01 from TwitterBerry
update:
crisatunity @statisticsio the problem I see with db on vm is that all of the db products are geared in very specific architecture not to be on vm.about 2 hours ago from web in reply to statisticsio jmkehayias @statisticsio almost all of our production servers are VM based for DR scenarios. I have physical servers for dev. How backwards is thatabout 3 hours ago from TwitterGadget in reply to statisticsio Efelito @statisticsio and as @mrdenny said, all dev, qa, and uat are very happy in VMs.about 3 hours ago from web Efelito @statisticsio works well for us on instances with low memory requirements SCOM, VCenter, SharePoint, and SSRS Have more detail if you wantabout 3 hours ago from web SQLDBA @statisticsio virtualizing, yes...but not in prod, only in dev & stage. Very easy to spin up new servers for developers.about 4 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to statisticsio idolan @statisticsio Ours has been virtual about 10 mos. Suspicious there may be a performance hit but maintenance advantages are a big win.about 4 hours ago from web in reply to statisticsio
I am not an expert but I have been paying close attention to this area. This is just a primer. To me we should it break up into two areas: Real cloud computing and utility computing. However, they get lumped together because “The Cloud” is the such a buzz work right now. I think it is important to make the distinction. Thus the post.
Cloud computing
You can break cloud computing into two main areas. An end to end development platforms like Google AppEngine or the Windows Azure stack. The second bucket contains SaaS applications like Google Apps, MS Office online which is in closed beta right now or Zoho. We will not be talking about the SaaS apps.
As for as the DBA is concerned, the database is total abstracted. It is like your dev team is using an ORM but you do not manage the database behind it. This is where we get cut out.
Pros: No CapEX, less management
Cons: Immature technology, less flexibility
Utility Computing
Utility Computing is basically a virtualized instance of a OS. The administrator is still needed. It is just like a bare iron server install but the hardware is abstracted. It is transparent to SQL and the OS except for different hardware drivers. Companies that offer these services are Amazon with EC2, Terremark with Infinistructure\Enterprise Cloud and GoGrid.
Pros: No CapEX, more flexibility, full feature sets
Cons: Performance overhead do to virtualization. Licensing costs may apply.
Disclosure: I am employed by Terremark who offers utility computing.(even though we call it “The Enterprise Cloud :) )
We regret to inform you of a passing in the SQL community. Read more here.
Rick Heiges has a post on my favorite new feature in SQL Server 2008, filtered indexes.
So does Decipherinfosys along with a good description on the difference of indexes and statistics if you need some background.
SQLBlogcasts has gotten an upgrade and Tony posts some great stats. Congrats!
Not SQL per say but the Hyper-V release candidate has been released. Speaking of Hyper-V, Sriram posts his slide decks on virtualizing SQL. Part 1 and Part 2.
This is a great starting point for SQL Server 2008 as is this. These come by way of the MSDN\Technet update blog.
The SQL Server 2005 sp3 debate continues.
The SQL ISV team posts a performance improving cursor rewrite sample. However, it is not ANSI compliant :) which is odd since most ISV tsql code needs to be portable.
Paul Nielson will be releasing a DVD.
While we are at it, check out the new SQL Server social network.
alt head: Got ADD?
Technorati Tags: SQL Server,SQL Server 2008,SQL Server 2005,SQL Server 2000,tsql,cursors,virtualization,filtered indexes,social networking
I have worked on two applications that were completely virtualized both on the front end and on the data tier. This post will cover my observations and experience. Both applications were similar. Both were newly developed ASP.Net 2.0 web applications with a SQL2005 x86 standard edition backend. They went with a virtual environment to avoid CAPEX. They both had 2 VPU, 2GB of RAM and a good HP EVA SAN. The databases were new so they were relatively small. The first one was tuning during a pre-production automated load test. The second was tuning a production work load.
I treated it as a normal tuning gig. I captured a perfmon log to determine which, if any, hardware subsystems were the bottleneck. They both turned up no disk or memory bottleneck. CPU averaged 70-80%. However, slow response times at the front end were reported. Upon further investigation, there was a CPU queue length, SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD wait types, and runnable tasks averaging five or higher. We definitely had a CPU bottleneck. The only odd thing is we could not hit 100% CPU.
After some research, it appears that the CPU time counter may not be totally accurate. The full details can be found in this white paper.
“CPU usage data collected within virtual machines is not useful for two reasons. First, this data does not always accurately reflect the overhead of virtualization that is incurred by the ESX Server host. Second, because of the way time is kept within virtual machines, the usage data itself may be inaccurate(for details, see “Timekeeping in VMware Virtual Machines” in “References”). For these reasons, we use CPU usage data collected on the ESX Server host in this study. We used the esxtop tool to collect resource utilization statistics for VMware ESX Server. For further details, see “Appendix 2: Data Collection.”
Well, I went on tuning like a normal CPU bottleneck. We made substantial gains mainly through indexing, parameterization and caching at the web tier. We did nothing different because of virtualization.
Although I have yet to experience it myself, the white paper shows nice gains by using x64 especially if you need a multiprocessor environment so that is another thing to keep in mind. I would love to hear your experience.