Database Administrators Stack Exchange
Database Administrators Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [hardware]

78 questions
36
votes
4 answers

CPU clock speed versus CPU core count - higher GHz, or more cores for SQL Server?

We are beginning to provision a set of physical servers for a virtual cluster of SQL Server 2016 nodes within VMware. We will be utilizing Enterprise Edition licenses. We plan on setting up 6 nodes, but there is a bit of a debate on what the ideal…
PicoDeGallo
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30
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4 answers

Do SSDs reduce the usefulness of Databases

I only heard about Robert Martin today, and it seems like he's a notable figure in the software world, so I don't mean for my title to appear as if it's a click bait or me putting words in his mouth, but this is simply how I interpreted what I heard…
Honinbo Shusaku
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26
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3 answers

How to optimization database for heavy I/O from updates (software and hardware)

The situation I have a postgresql 9.2 database which is quite heavily updated all the time. The system is hence I/O bound, and I'm currently considering making another upgrade, I just need some directions on where to start improving. Here is a…
Niels Kristian
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20
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5 answers

Optimal drive configuration for SQL Server 2008R2

I have a fairly busy database server running SQL Server 2008 R2 that has the following setup: SATA RAID 1 (2 Drives) - OS / Programs SAS RAID 10 (4 Drives) - Sql Database Files (data and logs) SAS RAID 1 (2 Drives) - TempDB (data and…
DanP
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16
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3 answers

SQL Server not using all CPU cores/threads

After upgrading our SQL Server's hardware, we noticed in the Windows Task Manager that the SQL instance is only using half of the threads available to it: . The server has the following hardware and software: Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise 64bit…
Moharrer
15
votes
1 answer

Does SQL Server 2017, including older versions, support 8k disk sector sizes?

Disk (loosely worded to include not only rotational media but non-rotational media [SSD, NVMe, etc.]) drives are continuing to evolve in their underlying formats and hardware. Part of this was an "enhancement" from 512 byte physical sector sizes to…
Sean Gallardy
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15
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1 answer

How to go about extending volumes on SQL Server boxes?

Here is a question for the sys ops out there (or those who have gone through this experience before). My company wants to allocate additional disk space on existing SQL Server boxes in production. We are wondering whether extending a volume…
Martin Surasky
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14
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2 answers

More CPU cores vs faster disks

I'm part of a small company so as usual covering a number of different roles. The latest of which is procuring a dedicated SQL Server box for our .NET web app. We've been quoted on a dual Xeon E5-2620 (six core) 2.00 GHz CPU configuration (12 cores…
QFDev
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12
votes
1 answer

How do you calculate how much hardware resources you need for a database?

We are in the process of scaling our database servers. I was wondering how should we calculate how much hardware resources we need for our databases? Here is a little bit information about our current database server: MySQL Database InnoDB for all…
Mahdi
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11
votes
3 answers

general memory requirements for sql server 2008 r2

I'm not experienced with DBA work, but I'm trying to make a case for requesting additional resources for our sql server and was hoping I could get some smart folks to provide a rough rough estimate of what we should be running. I'm suspecting that…
RMuesi
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11
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1 answer

Why don't SQL Server queries use more than 7MB/sec of disk I/O

I have an SSD that, using IOmeter test, shows performance over 200MB/s. However when I run any SQL query from local machine the windows resource monitor never shows disk IO above 7MB/sec. This holds true even for queries that take over 2 minutes…
Dean MacGregor
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9
votes
1 answer

Strange behaviour DBCC Shrinkfile

I am attempting to run a dbcc shrinkfile in chunks of 1GB against a database where 95% of the data has been archived and deleted. I'm leaft with a 235GB file where 9GB is data/indexes. I want to shrink this down to 50GB. I know that shrinking…
ptreston
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9
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3 answers

Is there a performance benefit to placing transaction log files on a separate drive?

There are many blog posts and best practice articles extolling the virtues of placing the SQL Server data file on one hard drive and the transaction log on another. The reason given is that that the database file will be experiencing random reads…
8kb
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8
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1 answer

SQL Server not using available memory

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition (64-bit) on Windows 2008R2 Enterprise Server has over 300 GB of memory but total memory use in control panel never goes over 86 GB Have SQL configured to use the maximum amount of memory Even under heavy use…
paparazzo
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8
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1 answer

Strategies for organising SQL Server with large amount of RAM

We now have a new server for our DB and amongst other things we have 128GB of RAM available (previously I had 16GB) . I know SQL Server is very good at managing it's resources, but I was wondering if there are any special settings or strategies that…
Preet Sangha
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