The Largest Databases
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Does SQL Server qualify for consideration as one of the Very Large Database platforms?
I think it does and I think it's qualified for years, certainly as long as SQL Server 2000 has been around. It's a strong platform and capable of handling large amounts of data with a well-designed application and appropriate hardware. The old knock from the v4.2 and v6.5 days of it being for departmental applications only isn't valid.
Apparently the Winter Group survey shows some interesting numbers as well. This isn't news from this week, but it's a valid survey and popped up since Microsoft has a new Bigdata site for SQL Server, designed to help prove it's a good enterprise platform. On there you can see the results of the Winter Group survey (also here, 700kb PDF) with 43 databases over a TB, eight over 5TB, and SQL Server hosting the largest databases on Windows.
It's a marketing effort, but it does show that SQL Server is more than capable of handling a TB sized warehouse. So if your boss is in doubt, you might want to let him know of these results.
I also caught an interesting blog entry on SQL Server and virtualization. It talks about the issues you might encounter in a virtual environment and why you might not want to put any production servers on VMs. I tend to agree with that and am not sure that it's worth the gains from running multiple servers on one physical box. It's a technology I think is much better suited to QA and development environments.
One very interesting thing to really consider before you put SQL Server in a VM. Each instance in a VM needs to be licensed. If you're licensing by the CPU, and you have 2 instances in 2 separate VMs on a 2 CPU box, you'd need 4 CPU licenses (2 for each VM). While I believe licensing is a small part of the overall application cost, I'm not sure this type of licensing makes any sense for end users.
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Your link to "an interesting blog entry" is not working.
It strikes me as unfair that Microsoft insists on licensing SQL Server for each processor on the server, since their Virtual Server can only use one processor at a time for an individual VM. Since the VM is acting as a uniprocessor system, why should a license be needed for each processor?
Virtual Server 2005 performance tips:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;903748
"Currently, each virtual machine operates as a uniprocessor computer. In this situation, one thread on the host computer acts as the processor for each virtual machine."
It sounds like running multiple instances of SQL Server is a better deal, since each instance can access all processors, and you can run as many instances as you want under the same license.
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Not sure you are right about the licensing. It is my understanding that CPU licensing is by physical processor regardless of VMs and number of processor cores. I would recommend checking this out with people at Microsoft and get it in writing.
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According to my reading of this document (http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/sqlserverlicensing.mspx) and the example they give (5VM instances on a 4way box), they require 5 licenses. It reads "license per virtual processor", not physical processor.
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I don't think license is the only reason because I met a consultant in charge of a 4Terabytes a year PeopleSoft SQL Server database he did not know 64bits was an option before he talked to HP. I think SQL Server being Windows subsystem also have something to do with it because Windows Networks are 32bits so adding a 64bits version with twice the memory and CPU to run SQL Server is considered a waste.
I have said this before I have not used 32bits Oracle 9i or 10g because the OS is IBM AIX 64bits and oracle is implemented as a number crunching tool not a subsystem of AIX, when I needed to apply security patches on the 9i there are two C++ compilers in the root directory one Oracle and one IBM. People will spend money when Microsoft makes the 64bits version independent isolated member of the Windows network because 64bits are usually implemented by banks, Pharma Lab and other number crunching companies who do not want Windows activities eating into what is needed to run the application. What I mean is the IBM AIX admin have nothing to do with Oracle is not even allowed access to anything to do with Oracle.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
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