Development / Testing / Deployment

  • We are developing and testing an Application on a single processor Database Server, but Production is on a Quad Processor Database Server ?

    - any issues at the database level here ?

  • Not that I've had. If anything its a good setup, since you'll be testing with less horsepower than you'll have in production. If it runs ok on your development box should run smoothly in production.

    Andy

  • i agree with andy, should be no real difference.

    Steve Jones

    steve@dkranch.net

  • At the database level itself no, at the database server then you will only see performance gains. This is ideal situation in that you are programming with less resources and will tend to find bugs better are a lower resource system.

    "Don't roll your eyes at me. I will tape them in place." (Teacher on Boston Public)

  • There are some issues with parallellism in both SQL Server 7 and 2000 though that could cause your queries to run slower and even return incorrect results when this options is used on servers with multiple processors. I would recommend setting parallellism=1.

    Right-click the server in Enterprise Manager, and then click Properties. Click the Processor tab. Under Parallelism, set the number of processors to execute queries in parallel to 1 (equals OFF).

    /Argyle

  • Why would you do that until you discover you have a problem? Better to tune the offending query than give up multi processor power altogether. Im using one 4 way box and one 8 way box and everything working fine.

    Andy

  • I prefer to be on the safe side since there have been so many issues with it on SQL7 and there still are on SQL 2000. It's not always it's easy to discover if a query is returning correct results or not.

  • Hey argyle can you point me to a document on this, I have neve seen this occurr and am curious how this occurrs.

    "Don't roll your eyes at me. I will tape them in place." (Teacher on Boston Public)

  • Better to fix the queries that have problems than give up parallelism altogether in my view. That's why we bought the big boxes to start with!

    Andy

  • Tend to agree that you should fix the queries if you have time, or at least test if you can. If it's a critical production box, I'd leave it off if there is doubt and let the queries run singly. You'll still get benefits with multiple queries running on different processors, just not large queries being split across multiple cpus.

    Steve Jones

    steve@dkranch.net

  • It really depends on what environment you work in. If you only have a few databases on a few server and you have control over all the queries then fine, go ahead and verify them. But for me working with hosting we have thousands of small databases that clients use and there is no possible way for us to verify all queries in this environemnt.

    Are you on the swynk SQL 7 and SQL 2000 mailing lists? Search trough the archives there and you will see why turning of parallelism is the "general consensus" to do, if in doubt. But as I said it depends on which environment you work in.

    Problems are not that common in 2000 but some still occur.

  • Can add that searching trough the mails I have on those lists I get over 200 hits on "parallelism" (not saying all are related to problems but many are). The first time I encountered a problem with parallelism (on SQL 7) I got these replies:

    -----------------------------------

    26 april 2001:

    Hi.

    I recently got this error on a SQL server 7.0 SP1 (a cluster node) and it shut down.

    Error: 1203, Severity: 20, State: 1

    Process ID 153 attempting to unlock unowned resource KEY:

    8:7059161:1

    (d800e252ec87)..

    Read something about that this could happen when you run with multiple processors. Is the error above reason enough to put degree of parallelism to 1 (turned off) on the server? Also, is there ever any real use of having degree of parallelism turned on, on a system that constantly have more connections in use than the number of processors on the server?

    ----------------------------

    AFAIK you never want parallellism turned on - it's too flakey.

    Turn it off and leave it there.

    /Kenneth

    ---------------------

    Yep, don't even think about parallelism until SP3.

    Mark.

    ------------------------

    And just FYI...

    if you go there parallelism is still flakey in 2000...

    (without a hotfix)....

    Worse yet.. it's a very dangerous kind of flakey

    in that it returns inconsistent result sets..

    without error.

    bb

    -----------------

    Edited by - argyle on 03/25/2002 03:18:16 AM

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