Installing SQL Server on a Desktop Machine
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Hi, I've posted something similar at the microsoft forums but thought someone here may be able to give some advice...
I am responsible for the reporting of our organisation. Currently data is taken from the enterprise system and reported on using Microsoft Access and Excel. Since this is not an ideal data warehousing solution, we have decided to upgrade to SQL Server 2005 Standard to implement a data warehousing solution. This however has been put on hold because of cost constraints in updating the server software and the CALs that will also be needed. As an alternative, temporary solution I have thought of installing SQL Server on a spare desktop machine. This machine is a P4 3.2GHz with 1GB of RAM and 40GB hard disk. If I added RAM and Hard Disk, and put Windows Server 2003 on it, would this be able to act as a SQL Server?
The usage of this server would be as follows: table updates would run in the morning, along with the emailing/printing of several reports. After that most usage would be via Excel queries. There would be around 20-30 users doing this, with no more than 10 accessing the SQL Server concurrently.
Eventually the SQL Server system would be moved to a server, but this cannot happen until 8 months or so. I am ready to start going live with a SQL Server solution, and want to use to desktop machine as a temporary solution. I want to know whether using this desktop will provide a workable solution. I know it is far from perfect, but considering we are currently running Access as a reporting database server, will the solution work temporarily?
Regarding maintennance and support, seeing it is not a mission critical solution, I had planned to backup the data files and any code created in BIDS on a seperate server. In the event of a disaster this would allow me to recreate the data warehouse on another hard drive. Again, it is an imperfect solution but I am hoping it would do the job until a server machine becomes available.
Purchasing a server is not really an option yet due to the price. The cost of SQL Server has already been approved, and if I go with this desktop machine only another $1200 or so will be needed for Server 2003 and hardware upgrades.
Any help or opinions with this would be great.
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Your main problem with the workstation playing the role of the server will be the I/O subsystem, you don't normally have multiple SCSI arrays in a workstation? What sort of hard disks are beinf used IDE, SATA, ???
I've been able to use a workstation with 4 x Western Disgital Raptor 10K SATA drives. The performance was ok but obviously not as good as the SCSI array.
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Colt 45 - the original point and click interface
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I don't know much about servers - does their main performance advantage arise from having arrays of disks? The 40GB disk that is already in the workstation is IDE, and I would probably put another 80-160GB in along with more RAM. What sort of hardware upgrades would provide the largest performance boost for SQL Server?
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As you'll be using IDE, the disk I/O subsystem will be your bottleneck. Probably the best you could do is have two disks one on IDE1 the other on IDE2.
If you can put a SCSI card in the workstation and use a couple of SCSI disks you'll get much better I/O performance.
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Colt 45 - the original point and click interface -
While you have described your environment very well, one thing you left out was the current size and planned growth rates for your databases...it might matter somewhat
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Currently we run several Access databases for different parts of the business, so there is a sales database, a financial one, a stock orders one etc.. Several of these are reaching the Access size limitation of 2GB. I plan to start with the sales database and slowly move them all over to SQL Server in a single data warehouse. I expect the sales part of the data warehouse to be around 3-4GB when complete. All up I can't see myself using more than 7-8GB before the time a server becomes available.
In terms of users, there are around 30 people who are able to view reports, either on Excel or Reporting Services, but I am confident that no more than 10 will view concurrently. That raises another issue - whether running Reporting Services alongside SQL Server on the same machine will also be too much for it to handle?
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Hi Matt.
You should be careful here. I noticed that you are planning to install Win2003 on the workstation as well. Remember that this OS running concurrently with the SQL Database on this workstation might just be too much for it to handle.
Look at the recommended specifications ( not minimum ) for windows and for SQL Server and then make a decision on how you would approach this problem.
Although SCSI is the way to go, this workstation should have RAID capability, in which case you could go that route. I would suggest RAID 0 which would give you the best I/O throughput. You would need 2 X 40 GB's then.
Hope all goes well!
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