Gazareth (9/15/2014)
GilaMonster (9/14/2014)
Sometimes advice on a blog still scares me. Not often, but sometimes. Like todayConsider using a RAMDisk for Index filegroups.
Putting non-clustered indexes on a RAMDisk will greatly improve performance
Be absolutely sure that your RAMDisk either backs itself up to disk, or at least saves and loads itself from a real disk on shutdown and startup.
This can significantly increase shutdown/startup/reboot times.
I also recommend doing regular SQL backups of these filegroups.
If the system crashes, recovering the database becomes a lot harder. Which is why backups are very important.
Crikey. I haven't encountered RAM disks since Windows 3.11/Dos 6.
How does RAM measure up to SSD's in £/GB these days?
That's the wrong unit of measurement. You need to consider the life of your data.
I think it's currently quite a bit more expensive than SSDs if you ignore lifetime. If on the other hand you assume that your RAM discs' perfomance will still be OK in the medium to distant future, it's a bit cheaper - and how much cheaper (if any) depends on whose propaganda you are prepared to swallow.
Tom