Filegroups and SAN-based environment

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Filegroups and SAN-based environment

Coriolan

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January 23, 2008 at 8:47 pm

#185964

I have a database that currently contains about 5 tables
each has about 2 millions rows , each row size is about 8K to 15K.
The database is in a SAN-based environment, 64-bit SQL Server.
Q: Do I just let SAN do what it is supposed to do or
should I plan to put each table in its own filegroup?
Thanks

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GRE (Gethyn Ellis) SSCrazy Eights Points: 9602 More actions · Answer 1

Are you getting any problems with performance letting the SAN "do its job".

We have many large databases with many millions of rows in certain tables, all with indexes etc and we split the tables, indexs and logs into different file groups on different LUNS in the SAN. BUT it really depends on you system and SAN config

Gethyn Elliswww.gethynellis.com

Coriolan SSCommitted Points: 1931 More actions · Answer 2

We have not gone live yet. Still in the setup phase this week. We will find out if there is any performance issues soon. Thanks

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736188 More actions · Answer 3

There's no way for us to help you with this. You need to do some testing with and without filegroups and see if it's better. You might also want to see if there is a difference between how you might get LUNs on the SAN. It's possible that you could get 3 or 4 LUNs, but they're all being backed by the same disks.

Matt Miller (4) SSC Guru Points: 124210 More actions · Answer 4

While I agree with Steve that we can't help you answer this specifically - don't fall of the marketing nonsense that the SAN will "automagically" or somehow auto-sense what you need and do it for you. You need to tell it what you need it to do very specifically, or it has the potential to be worse than not having it there at all.

As to the question of HOW to tell it what you need, and what the best scenario is for your situation, THAT's where we can't really help. That's going to be dependent on what kind of SAN you have, what your app does, how it does it, etc....

But - you can count on having to take a "hands-on" (you or the person running the SAN for you) approach to TELLING it what to do.

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