Voice of the DBA

Tag: hardware

  • The Wish List

    It’s the holiday season and a joyous time for many of us. I do hope you are feeling the giving spirit and looking to creates smiles for others as you prepare for your particular celebration during the break from work next week. This is certainly a time to remember that many others are less fortunate that most of us that work in technology, and I’d encourage you to consider giving something to help others.

    Howver, many of us will receive gifts this holiday season, and in the spirit of having some fun, I wanted to make a fun poll this week.

    What is on the top of your wish list that would help improve your time at work?

    If you are like me, the one thing you’d really like is more time. It’s unlikely I (or you) will receive that particular gift, but I know that it’s the one resource that is always limited for me. Barring that, I think there are a few things that might make work time a bit better for me.

    I’m not in an office, but having a nice set of headphones to help me concentrate on a task, or even relax while traveling would be good. My laptop is starting to have some issues, so I’ll be looking to replace it at some point, but many of you might find yourself working faster with a newer, more powerful machine. No matter what your hardware, you need a place to work, so maybe 2015 is the time to try a taller, or faster, desk. Perhaps you just need a few more USB ports, a little power on the go, or even a new way to commute to the office.

    The array of possibilities for changing work continues to grow as technology advances the world. We can work anywhere, though it is important to stop working and relax. Perhaps the best thing for many of us might be a way to refresh and recharge away from work so that we’ll be ready to hit the ground running when we return. The best way to do that is to take your vacation.

    Let us know what might be on your fun list, and have a fantastic holiday season. I know I will as I’m leaving tomorrow for a week in Steamboat Springs.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Normalizing Performance

    This week I ran across a post from Glenn Berry on hardware performance that I thought framed the concept of performance value well. In the post, Glenn talks about the latest TPC-E benchmark and the SQL Server performance values that vendors release. Glenn mentions that he always tries to divide out the numbers to provide better comparisons for the various hardware choices.

    That makes a lot of sense to me, as I think very few of us would be able to afford the top of the line systems on which vendors run the benchmarks. Most of us try to somehow compare the results in some way and then make our own decisions for our smaller systems. I don’t know many people that run 36 core machines, but I do know lots that need to decide which 4 or 8 core systems they should choose.

    The idea of normalizing performance to smaller loads is something we do often. We need to do this, because we often can’t get the same size, scale, or specifications in our test systems as we have in production. As much as we’d like to have them, resources are limited, and we do need to have some way of extrapolating the results in our development and test systems forward to production.

    Glenn has a way of doing this for CPUs, and while you might not agree with his method, at least he has an organized way of doing things, and then letting empirical results provide feedback on whether this works well. You should do the same thing, whether you’re trying to gauge disk or T-SQL speed. Develop a hypothesis (or read about how other do so)  for measuring your performance on a lesser, and then your primary system. Take time to run some test the same way, even if it’s single query performance on a production system while it’s live.

    You won’t get perfect results and scalability, but you’ll develop a few metrics that allow you to determine if your decisions in development will have severe negative impacts. There still might be problems, but you should eliminate more and more of these over time.

  • The Flash Database

    I caught this piece on the impact of flash storage on database engine design this week. It’s interesting as there’s been debate for years as to whether SQL Server should alter its behavior if it detects SSDs being used for storage instead of physical disks. It doesn’t, and perhaps that’s fine, though the article makes me think there are performance gains to be had if behavior changes.

    The article really looks at a few of the NoSQL products, though the design changes aren’t necessarily specifically limited to those products. I particularly thought that two ideas in the piece were interesting: indexes in memory with data on disk and the realization that threading can be he bottleneck with SSDs. I’m not sure if Windows and/or SQL Server could use these ideas, but they are interesting.

    I do wonder sometimes if a little more control of indexes would be helpful in SQL Server. Imagine if I could limit a large slice of memory to strictly non-clustered indexes and then have other data on SSDs. Would there be a way to tune SQL Server to run better for some workloads? Perhaps the algorithsm that choose query plans would change if they knew a scan of an NCI could be completed in a fraction of the time that a seek took place on a CI? Maybe we’d be willing to perform more seeks on in-memory indexes before performing lookups on disk.

    The idea of more concurrent operations, requiring more threads, also seems to be an area where I could suspect that both Windows Server and SQL Server could benefit from SSDs. If the systems changed their read and write algorithms and used many more threads with SSDs, could we get more throughput? Should our systems be more aware of how many controllers and paths might be on a system? I wonder, especially as some of this hardware becomes cheaper and cheaper. I could certainly see more organizations looking at using lots of smaller SSDs for a few servers that require high performance than a SAN.

    However it’s not as though SQL Server isn’t trying to take advantage of technology changes. The In-Memory OLTP system  and Buffer Pool Extensions in SQL Server 2014 are designed to take advantage of more memory and SSDs to dramatically improve performance. I don’t know what else might be coming in the next version of SQL Server, but I do hope that as new ideas emerge, SQL Server considers taking advantage of them.

  • Laptop Dreams

    The Surface 3 was announced last week, and I was underwhelmed by the event, especially the presentation itself. The entire spectable didn’t seem to compare to some other companies’ announcements. I did, however, find myself thinking about replacing my laptop with a tablet that’s lighter and allows me to forgo a keyboard. As much as I use a keyboard and depend on a responsive set of keys to get work done, there are definitely times when I’d like to just have a screen, and certainly a lighter form factor.

    Today is Memorial Day in the US, and I’ll be outside in a variety of situations today. Every year my son recognizes and remembers our soldiers at a Memorial Day ceremony with his fellow Boy Scouts. I like to capture some photos and video of the occasion, as well as track which Scouts are supposed to be there and have actually shown up. I can do it on a phone, but a laptop is too cumbersome. A tablet is actually the best option. It seems funny to use a larger device, but being able to capture and playback video on a tablet for others is much nicer than using a small phone. 

    I’ll also be cooking outside in the afternoon, and while my memory is pretty good, I’d like to be able to pull up a recipe on a screen I can easily see with my aging eyes. My iPad works well for this, but for many tasks that require the creation of content, it’s not always a good choice, and the upgrade to the Surface is tempting.

    Then there’s work. I’ve been struggling with finding a powerful laptop to run the suite of products that I present on, especially when I have some of the server systems running. The best solution for a small, powerful device, might be this Gigabyte BRIX for me, but I’d still need some keyboard and display to access it. While an iPad w/ keyboard can work, I’m wondering if a Surface might be better. I’d love to not only be able to access the device, but do so while I’m walking around. If I can get that to work, maybe I’ll have found the perfect device for me.

    Have a great Memorial Day.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA 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.