I was listening to sports radio the other morning as I checked email and started my day. The college football season is getting going in the US and so the various shows are comparing the schools and conferences with each other. Since I live in Big 12 country, I was listening as they talked about two of the larger ones, Texas and Texas A&M.
Now Texas is a better program, has more success every year, and has won a few national championships. The person talking said they were definitely a better program, but then he said something interesting. Texas A&M, in his opinion, was a better program for the money. Their budget is much lower and they have similar levels of success.
That got me thinking since most of the teams I follow haven't had huge success, but I don't think they've spent the same money as others. I thought as well about how this related to my database work at various places. Often I've had to squeeze as much performance as possible from machines, but at the same time watching a budget.
So I thought this might make an interesting Friday poll:
What's more important, performance or price/performance?
The TPC benchmarks exist for both of these categories, and while SQL Server has excelled in the latter, it hasn't often been in the top ten for the former. Is that good or bad? I'm not really sure since both of these measurements have their own value.
In my experience, I need to have the performance that the business demands. Whatever that is, and it's rarely approached the high levels seen in the TPC benchmarks, but I want to be sure that each server runs efficiently if possible. It's one reason that I like the idea of virtualizing SQL Server. There's work to be done there in making it run smoother, and definite guidelines for I/O paths, but I like the idea.
In almost every place I've worked, price/performance is more important. We've never had huge scale issues or dealt with extreme levels of transactions, so the efficiency was really more important. I've spent a good portion of my career consolidating instances to try and increase the price/performance ratios of the hardware we used.
However I'm sure many of you have different perspectives and I'm sure others would love to hear what you value more and why.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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