Joe Chang

What breaks with GPT disk partitions greater than 2TB?

jchang — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:06:00 GMT

In one of the recent Windows OS versions, GUID Partition Table (GPT) became an option in addition to Master Boot Record (MBR) for creating disk partitions, with GPT supporting volumes larger than 2TB. In MBR, a 32-bit unsigned integer addresses 512-byte...(read more)

Intel Server Strategy Shift with Sandy Bridge EN & EP

jchang — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:04:00 GMT

The arrival of the Sandy Bridge EN and EP processors, expected in early 2012, will mark the completion of a significant shift in Intel server strategy. For the longest time 1995-2009, the strategy had been to focus on producing a premium processor designed...(read more)

New SQL Server 2012 per core licensing – Thank you Microsoft

jchang — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:19:00 GMT

Many of us have probably seen the new SQL Server 2012 per core licensing, with Enterprise Edition at $6,874 per core super ceding the $27,495 per socket of SQL Server 2008 R2 (discounted to $19,188 for 4-way and $23,370 for 2-way in TPC benchmark reports)...(read more)

TPC-H Benchmarks - Westmere-EX versus RISC

jchang — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:03:00 GMT

There has been relatively litle activity in TPC Benchmarks recently with the exception of the raft of Dell TPC-H results with Exa Solutions. It could be that systems today are so powerful that few people feel the need for benchmarks. IBM published an...(read more)

New Fusion ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo

jchang — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:06:00 GMT

Fusion-iO just announced the new ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo on Oct 2011 (at some conference of no importance). The MLC models will be available late November and the SLC models afterwards. See the Fusion-iO press release for more info. Below are the Fusion-IO...(read more)

Consumer SSDs with SQL Server

jchang — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 03:21:00 GMT

Over the last two years, I have stood up several proof-of-concept (POC) database server systems with consumer grade SSD storage at cost $2-4K per TB. Of course production servers are on enterprise class SSD, Fusion-IO and others, typically $25K+ per TB....(read more)

Laptop for database performance consultants

jchang — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 21:39:00 GMT

Today, it is actually possible to build a highly capable database system in a laptop form factor. There is no point to running a production database on a laptop. The purpose of this is so that consultants (i.e., me), can investigate database performance...(read more)

Oracle Index Skip Scan

jchang — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:55:00 GMT

There is a feature, called index skip scan that has been in Oracle since version 9i. When I across this, it seemed like a very clever trick, but not a critical capability. More recently, I have been advocating DW on SSD in approrpiate situations, and...(read more)

Intel Xeon E7 (Westmere-EX) and Sandy Bridge comments

jchang — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:00:00 GMT

Last week Intel announced the 10-core Xeon E7-x8xx series (Westmere-EX), superceding the Xeon 6500 and 7500 series (Nehalem-EX). The E7 group consists of the E7-8800 series for 8-way systems, the E7-4800 series for 4-way systems and the E7-2800 series...(read more)

New Seagate SSD and Hard Disks

jchang — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:53:00 GMT

Seagate today announced a near complete overhaul of their enterprise product line. This include second generation SSD now with either SAS and SATA interfaces. The first generation Pulsar SSD only supported SATA interface. The new 2.5in 15K and 10K hard...(read more)

HP ProLiant DL980-Oracle TPC-C Benchmark spat

jchang — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 04:39:00 GMT

The Register reported a spat between HP and Oracle on the TPC-C benchmark. Per above, HP submitted a TPC-C result of 3,388,535 tpm-C for their ProLiant DL980 G7 (8 Xeon X7560 processors), with a cost of $0.63 per tpm-C. Oracle has refused permission to...(read more)

Parallel Data Warehouse

jchang — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:58:00 GMT

The Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse diagram was somewhat difficult to understand in terms of the functionality of each subsystem in relation to the configuration of its components. So now that HP has provided a detailed list of the PDW components ,...(read more)

IBM System x3850 X5 TPC-H Benchmark

jchang — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 21:04:00 GMT

IBM just published a TPC-H SF 1000 result for their x3850 X5 , 4-way Xeon 7560 system featuring a special MAX5 memory expansion board to support 1.5TB memory. In Dec 2010, IBM also published a TPC-H SF1000 for their Power 780 system, 8-way, quad-core,...(read more)

Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 Reference Guide

jchang — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:48:00 GMT

Microsoft just release Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 Reference Guide version. The new changes are increased memory recommendation and the disks per RAID group change from 2-disk RAID 1 to 4-Disk RAID 10. Memory The earlier FTDW reference architecture...(read more)

Columnar Databases

jchang — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:24:00 GMT

Ingres just published a TPC-H benchmark for VectorWise , an analytic database technology employing 1) SIMD processing (Intel SSE 4.2), 2) better memory optimizations to leverage on-chip cache, 3) compression, 4) Column-based storage. Ingres originated...(read more)