John D. Rockefeller, was an Ohio native in the USA. He started Standard Oil. At one time he the world’s richest man and first ever American billionaire. This was in the early 1900’s, when a Billion Dollars was much more than we would imagine today. A reporter is said to have asked him, “How much money is enough?” Rockefeller was quoted as responding, “Just a little bit more.”
That’s pretty much how it feels when working with SQL Server. It seems I can never have enough CPU, Memory or storage. I always just simply want more. How much more? Well, as much as I can afford. I’ll be sure to use it one way or another.
What if you had an unlimited budget, and could configure a SQL Server any way you wanted? What would you make your priorities? Would you go after multiple cores first If you have adequate resources, multiple cores allows you to leverage parallelism in your queries, in some cases improving performance times. Would you go after LOTS of memory? I’ve seen implementations again using RAM disk for tempdb resulting in some really impressive performance numbers.
Would you put a lot of money in your disk storage? Would you get lots of spindles with many configurations to optimize data access patterns. Would you invest in high speed communication to your disk storage? How much money would you invest in support systems such as a SAN?
Maybe you put your hard earned money into failover, disaster recovery, or reporting systems by implementing different aspects of Always On?
Do you have a ratio for all of the above? Perhaps, given a certain budget, I would prioritize my finances on a percentage basis against these different subsystems.
What if? Why not leave a comment with your dream machine? Or perhaps, you’d rather be more pragmatic and share configurations that have proven effective for you?
Cheers,
Ben