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Max Memory for SQL Server 2005 standard edition

  • January 18, 2007 at 9:06 am

    #115896

    I'm lazy to do the research (or maybe I should really say I'm overworked, underpaid, and being asked to do 7 things at once, which is one more ball than my current juggling expertise can handle), so I'm wondering if someone would be so kind as to tell me what is the maximum memory that SQL Server 2005 standard edition can utilize out of the box without any extra licensing requirements.  I seem to recall that SQL Server 2000 had a 2 gig limit.  If this is not the limit for SQL Server 2000, then I wonder if I can by more, or better memory for myself.  Any help here would be great.  I'd like to thank you in advance for helping out this lazy DBA.

    Gregory A. Larsen, MVP

  • January 18, 2007 at 9:32 am

    #684046

    The operating system Maximum..

  • January 18, 2007 at 9:42 am

    #684050

    I'm guessing that windows 2003 has a max greater than 2 gig. 

     

    So now I have a question about how much memory we should purchase.  Anyone know of a website or documentation that has some numbers that might help you to determine how much to buy.  Like if your application is this big, does the many i/o's per second, this many transactions, has this many databases, then you should have this much memory.

     

     

    Gregory A. Larsen, MVP

  • January 18, 2007 at 10:11 am

    #684059

    Yes.. W2K3 Standard supports 4GB and Enterprise supports 128GB(x86) and 2 TB(64bit).

    I would think the recommendations vary as wildly as the applications out there..and the scenarios.. will there be other apps on the server? how much processing is going to be done etc etc..

  • January 18, 2007 at 6:46 pm

    #684178

    Since we are running on WK3 standard edition.  I guess 4 gb is max thanks.

    Gregory A. Larsen, MVP

  • January 18, 2007 at 10:46 pm

    #684194

    SQL Server 2005 Books Online 
    Memory Supported by the Editions of SQL Server 2005 
    http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143685.aspx
     

    MohammedU
    Microsoft SQL Server MVP

  • January 19, 2007 at 7:08 am

    #684285

    Ultimately it boils down to 32 bit versus 64 bit addressability.  For 32 bit to address above the 2 GB line, AWE is the solution.  But it has limitations as to what goes above the 2 GB line.  64 bit can address 1TB of RAM.  Definitely the strategic way to go.  Then Itanium versus AMD for 64 bit chip.  AMD can emulate 32 bit, Itanium can't.  AMD is more seemless.

  • January 19, 2007 at 8:09 am

    #684326

    Your mileage may vary, but we saw duration of large processes drop from several hours to 10-20 minutes after going to a new x64 SQL Enterprise server with 24GB RAM.

    Previous system:  4GB RAM, SQL 2000 Standard on Windows 2003 Standard, 2 Intel 2.8 GHz processors, fiber channel SAN

    New system 24GB RAM, SQL 2005 x64 Enterprise on Windows 2003 Standard x64, 2 AMD dual-core 3.8 GHz processors, SCSI DAS storage

    Largest database around 250GB, largest table around 50GB, primarily large batch processing so no transactions-per-second figures.

    I'm sure having faster processors helps, and having twice the CPUs helps, but I don't think that alone gets you a factor of 10 speedup.   The old system was not CPU-bound.  Being able to cache large tables completely in RAM it the primary benefit.

  • January 19, 2007 at 8:13 am

    #684328

    Thanks for the feed back.  Wow that those improvements are dramatic.

    Gregory A. Larsen, MVP

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