January 3, 2013 at 2:50 am
Nice idea (the tempdb thing) - I can think of one inherited application this could easily buy some time with. I'll investigate, cheers.
January 3, 2013 at 7:52 am
TempDB was where we first experimented with SSD's on our accounting system and it made a huge difference by greatly improving the I/O latency (we have a lot of EDI feeds into it). While I'd be first to say "write better code" it's usually not an option with most vendor's software so you opt for throwing more or better hardware at it, be it RAM or SSD's or some kind of indexing strategy. We will be spending a lot on SSD's this year where they will be dedicated to critical DBMS servers on our SAN, because like you said it can be a very cost effective tool.
January 3, 2013 at 9:32 am
I think the tempdb suggestion is an excellent idea. It could be a very good investment.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
SQL RNNR
Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
Learn Extended Events
January 3, 2013 at 12:24 pm
Will our code skills get better?
Over the years I have seen people come onboard who are really good and getting better. They stay a while and are gone. If you are lucky you can keep them a few years. Then you start over again. New person, new skill set, same learning curve, same complex business practices. Once they achieve mastery, they again are gone and you cycle again and again. All the time you are using their product which might not be getting better at all.
So if some are going to get the increase in speed or what we use to call throughput you might only get it by advancing the technology. The idea of throwing more hardware at a solution has not always been the best idea, but some have no option. TO this this is a great idea.
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
January 3, 2013 at 2:32 pm
Just remember three main things about SSD's before you run off and start putting stuff on them:
1. SSDs tend to wear out. The individual bits can’t be erased and written to again after a while. Flash memory has a limited number of times that data can be written to a location.
2. SSDs are expensive: The price per gigabyte is significantly more expensive than traditional drives. For example, a 2TB HDD costs around $100, which is exactly how much a 60GB SSD costs. You get way more storage for your buck with an HDD. SSDs are more expensive to produce, so the MSRP tends to be higher than that of HDDs.
3. SSDs has lower storage capacity: Compared to HDDs, SSDs have much less storage capacity. SSDs have not been made in real high capacities yet to my knowledge. So, you will probably have to spend more money for more storage.
Also, regarding TEMPDB please remember that tempdb is write heavy, and SSD's have a limited write life. I'm not saying that this can't work, people are doing it, I'm just saying it is something you need to be aware of. 😀
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
January 3, 2013 at 4:44 pm
The thing with traditional HDDs is that not all the space is usable due to the need for multiple spindles to deliver throughput so it isn't as simple a case as saying HDD = £x per unit and SSD = £y per unit.
If you are using SSD for locally attached storage then fantastic. If they are going in a SAN then remember the SAN header will probably get overwhelmed by the throughput.
January 4, 2013 at 7:58 am
David.Poole (1/3/2013)
The thing with traditional HDDs is that not all the space is usable due to the need for multiple spindles to deliver throughput so it isn't as simple a case as saying HDD = £x per unit and SSD = £y per unit.If you are using SSD for locally attached storage then fantastic. If they are going in a SAN then remember the SAN header will probably get overwhelmed by the throughput.
This is an excellent point, but probably manageable from the SAN's buffer. One of the first things I learned was that this was usually set too low for SQL Server. It varies from product to product as I recall.
January 4, 2013 at 10:30 am
Forgot to mention that pre SQL2012 putting TempDB on local storage in a cluster was possible but definitely not supported or recommended by Microsoft.
January 4, 2013 at 11:05 am
I have heard some horror stories a year or so ago about SSDs.... the one guy I know who works for MSFT as a SQL Server guru said, at that point in time he'd shy away from them. He knew of a couple of stories that they were very fast but all of a sudden they failed. Again, that was a couple of years ago. I know we use it for one of our high end Oracle DBs but it was very expensive when we got it.
January 4, 2013 at 1:34 pm
I've heard SSD horror stories, but most of them seem to be with Gen 1, early adoptions prior to a year or two ago.
These days the MTBF has gone up so much that I wouldn't hesitate to use them now.
January 4, 2013 at 1:37 pm
That is good to know Steve. We are about to purchase all new back end storage but I don't think any will be SSD's for any of our SQL Servers. The only thing we have today on that is redo logs for our one high end Oracle system (non Exadata) and that is being replaced by a SQL Server solution starting next month.
Viewing 12 posts - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply