We have considered many different ways to optimize database storage using self hosted implementations. Memory, Direct Attached disks, RAID and SAN technologies, all hosted on proprietary hardware, allow you to configure storage to your specific needs. But what do you do when you are one consumer of a shared storage mechanism, hosted on either virtual machines in house, or in […]

Once you get to a certain number of disks for a database server, it is no longer makes sense to manage the disks simply on a server level. The RAID controllers to handle a large number of disks near the cost of a small SAN device. The SAN may be a shared device, hosting disk storage for more than one […]

Unlike disk separation, which we discussed yesterday, as a method to optimize database performance, RAID combines multiple disks for a single task. RAID can be used only to provide redundancy of the hard disk to avoid data loss. However, it can be configured so that when you write data to the disk, it spreads the data across multiple disks, resulting […]

We’ve talked about different ways to optimize disk access for your SQL Server database. Memory may be used for SQL Server cache, tempdb. Disk controllers may have their own cache. You can purchase many different kinds of disks, each with its own performance capabilities. Today we are going to take a brief look at combining disks to work as a […]

If you need to optimize your disk for database access, and have implemented all the reasonable caching methods available, you can look into different disk optimization techniques. The simplest optimization is to put in a faster disk. Even when you purchase a database server there are many options for your disk systems. The least expensive are usually based on SATA […]

Knowing the restrictions of disk performance, how do you increase the performance of your database beyond the physics of your hard disk? There are two methods for performance improvement: 1) Caching, and 2) Higher performance Disk Configuraions. Caching can be done in many different layers. Firstly, SQL Server itself works in a cache. Increased RAM on the host, made available […]

When it comes to persisting database data to disk, there is one factor that has a huge impact: Physics. The disk rotates and the heads are moved in and out along the disk to read data. If the heads are in the wrong place they have to be moved in or out. If the data is not under the current […]

What kind of disk storage is on your database server? It does matter, depending on the size of your database, and the distribution of the data it contains. It also matters how much memory is available for SQL Server to do work. As you probably know, SQL Server does all of its work in memory. New records are created in […]

Once you get off the Windows server platform, many contend that Java is the dominant development tool. It seems that Microsoft really wants a piece of the action on the non-Microsoft servers. And who can blame them. They started off with a basic Me-Too implementation of a Java clone, using the Dot Net universal CLR. True to form, they put […]

A story is told about a mother and a daughter who were cooking a roast for thanksgiving feast. The first thing the mom did was to cut the roast in half. The daughter asked her mom why she cut the roast in half. The mother answered, “I don’t know. My mother always did it that way.” So, they called the […]