For Day 16 of this series, I am going to talk about a few useful tools you can use to identify some hardware details about a database server. These tools all require that you have access to login to that server, which might be a problem for some people, depending on the policies of their [...]
Glenn Berry
Semi-random musings about SQL Server performance
A SQL Server Hardware Tidbit a Day – Day 16
Posted on: April 16, 2013 12:14 pm
A SQL Server Hardware Tidbit a Day – Day 3
Posted on: April 3, 2013 1:40 pm
Today, I am going to talk about the existing Intel Westmere-EX processor family. Instead of this processor series being called the Intel Xeon 7600 series (as was originally expected by some), it is called the Intel Xeon E7 series, with separate model numbers for two socket, four socket and eight socket servers. This includes the [...]
What is the Difference Between Physical Sockets, Physical Cores, and Logical Cores?
Posted on: March 25, 2013 3:32 pm
I witnessed an interesting conversation on Twitter today where someone was talking about how he uses the terms sockets and cores interchangeably, since everyone else does, or words to that effect. This made me think that there may still be some confusion about how these terms are used and what they mean in relation to [...]
Microsoft DreamSpark Program
Posted on: March 25, 2013 1:56 pm
Back in 2008, Microsoft rolled out the DreamSpark program as a means to get Microsoft software design and development tools in the hands of students at no charge. It was initially only for university or college students, but it has been expanded to also cover high school students. Basically, this means that any high school, [...]
Two New TPC-E Submissions for SQL Server 2012
Posted on: November 29, 2012 11:47 am
Just when I was not looking, two new official TPC-E results have been posted in the last week. IBM has a 3218.46 TPC-E score for an IBM System x3850 X5 that has four Intel Xeon E7-4870 processors, while HP has an 1881.76 TPC-E score for an HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 system with two Intel Xeon [...]
Task Manager Enhancements in Windows Server 2012
Posted on: October 23, 2012 3:59 am
Windows Server 2012 was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, and it became “generally available” to customers on September 4, 2012. It is now being offered as an available server operating system from the Tier 1 hardware vendors, such as Dell, HP, IBM, etc. That means that you are likely to see new servers [...]
Memory Error Recovery in SQL Server 2012
Posted on: August 21, 2012 1:46 pm
One under publicized new feature in SQL Server 2012 is called Memory Error Recovery. This feature allows SQL Server 2012 to repair clean pages in the buffer pool by reading the pages again from disk. These “soft” errors are caused by electrical or magnetic interference inside a server that cause single bits inside of DRAM [...]
