Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 10/21/05 01:14

(csomberg@dwr.com) writes:
> I have the pleasure of assisting a friend with some changes to his
> system. One thing he needs is a new SQL setup that will scale.
>
> I was thinking of a quad exon box, 32 bit win2003 enterprise, 12 gig
> ram attached to a SAN via fiber with 15,000 rpm drives.
>
> If I need better perfromance, I will add servers on top of the san ...
>
> One reason for the horsepower is we are dealing with a bad old app that
> issues dynamic sql for 75% of its processing.

Beware that this app may not work well with that much memory. If the app
generates lots of dynamic SQL, SQL Server saves the plans for all these
queries in cash. If the queries are similar, they end up in the same
hash bucket, which the net result that looking up if there is an already
cached plan for a query, may take a very long time.

If the app is that civiilzed that it uses parameterised queries that uses
sp_executesql, then this is less likely to be an issue.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp

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