This is very cool, though I'm sure it's not the system that I want to work on. Sun is claiming a million message per second system for trading using Solaris 10 and Intel chips. I didn't hear much more on the system, though with Solaris I'd suspect that either Oracle or MySQL were used for the database. Despite working closer with Microsoft, I'm sure that SQL Server wasn't used.
But could it back a million message system?
I think it could, though the entire system would need to be designed to work with SQL Server. My guess is that any of the main RDBMS platforms could back a system sending a million messages a second if the system were well designed. That sounds a little silly, but it seems most systems that are designed poorly don't run well regardless of the hardware and software platforms, while well built systems seem to always exceed their design parameters.
Perhaps it is worth spending a little more time to architect things up front?
What's interesting about this announcement is that Sun used a standard system, the Thomson Reuters Market Data System, which is a platform that many financial companies use. They also used Intel based, dual quad core servers on a 1GB Ethernet network. These are commodity products and systems that anyone could purchase, at almost any size company. There aren't details give on how many servers are used, nor what the expected throughput is for similar sized systems before this. That could make a huge difference to how impressive this announcement is. If most systems are sending through 400,000 messages, it's impressive. If they send through 900,000+, then it might not be that big a deal.
Most of our systems never see large loads. Of the hundreds I've built or administered, very few of them have had scale issues and needed lots of time tuning. But I've also learned that I couldn't ever predict which of them would be unable to handle the load. It seems if I've planned for a large load, it never materializes and if I don't, I'm digging through SQL code and on a first-name basis with Mr. Profiler every day.
The best solution is to educate yourself constantly, improve your skills, and as MVP Jeff Moden might say, code it right the first time. It doesn't take any more time to write good code if you know how.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
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Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
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