September 25, 2006 at 11:58 am
I know this is a very vague question, so I will try to provide some details about our situation. We are looking to upgrade our current database server with a more powerful new one. We spec'ed out a PowerEdge 6850 server from Dell, but I figured it would really help to have the Hopefully all this information is enough to give a better idea of what we're looking for.
Our "live" database is coming in at about 17 Gb. We have nearly 700 tables, broken down like this:
Size Range | # of Tables
----------------------------------
8 - 100k | 500
100-1,000k | 50
1,000-10,000k | 60
10,000-100,000k | 60
100,000-500,000k | 20
500,000-3,000,000k | 5
The table counts are rounded off, but they're fairly close. The majority of the tables have LOTS of small records, with the average record coming in under 1k.
The database traffic usually goes like this: we have an average of 150 concurrent users, and every ~20 seconds we have a "pull", which means that one user selects 1 to 10 records from about 100 tables (an average of about 500 records altogether). Then about 3-5 minutes later, the user will close their session and 10-15 tables will get updated.
That's the majority of our traffic, but there's other kinds, obviously. Some large SELECTs, occasional large INSERTs, and we have one table that has a lot of small PDFs stored inside the table in an IMAGE column (there are about 300,000 records in that table at any given time). (I know that storing files in an image column isn't very efficient, but it has to be done that way for now.)
There's one gigabit ethernet connection going to the server, although most users are connected to the network at 100Mbps, and internal bandwidth usage isn't high, so that's not too much of a problem right now.
So with all that said, I'd like to keep the price of a new server under $20,000 (if possible under $15,000). Can anyone provide some recommendations on some good hardware configurations for making this database run as fast as it can? For example, what would priorities be for investing the most money into the solution (i.e. #1 disk RPM, #2 RAID controller, #3 CPU, etc...)?
I'm open to all suggestions, so please let me know if you have experience purchasing/configuring servers for large databases.
Thanks!
- Jonathan
September 28, 2006 at 8:18 am
get a 64bit dual core server with at least 16gb of ram. Memory will offset most disk subsystem performance problems. make sure at least that o/s+ binaries, tran logs, data and backups exist on seperate drive arrays ( four arrays minimum ) Try to avoid raid 5 , a raid 1 pair will perform as well as a four disk raid 5 for writes so if your system does more writes than reads don't use raid 5. You must know how your current system works ? judge the cpu from there but probably a dual dual core would be good. The good news is 64bit std edition has no memory limits so will reduce licensing costs.
I never look at hardware prices, I spec servers for a need, others make the decision vs costs etc.,
[font="Comic Sans MS"]The GrumpyOldDBA[/font]
www.grumpyolddba.co.uk
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/
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