Comments on: One Intel Processor Family to Avoid For SQL Server 2012/2014

By: Glenn Berry

Glenn Berry — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:53:13 +0000

I am sure that trend contributes to stories of poor performance and poor user experience. Running virtualized SQL Server workloads on hosts that have low performance processors is not going to benefit performance…

I would also guess that more performance problems are caused by oversubscription and lack of host resources (CPU, memory, and I/O) to properly support the total workload.

By: Bob Duffy

Bob Duffy — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 09:47:38 +0000

Hi Glenn,

How much do you think that the leaning towards dense low power CPUs for virtualisation hosts is adding to stories of poor user experience post virtualisation.

Best Regards,
Bob

By: Glenn Berry

Glenn Berry — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 17:13:56 +0000

In reply to Leon McCalla.

Leon,

Well, it really depends on what your database server is being used for and how many people are relying on it to do their jobs on a daily basis. Saving a few seconds (or minutes) each time a query or report runs could pretty quickly pay for the pretty small incremental cost of a fast processor, especially when multiple employees are affected. The database server is likely to be in service for at least 3-5 years, so spending a few hundred dollars more for that server is going to be pretty insignificant to most companies. If things are really so tight that a few hundred dollars is really an issue, there are probably much more serious issues going on with the business.

My main point was/is that incremental processor costs pale when compared to SQL Server license costs. By choosing the right processor, you can quite often run a given workload on a smaller number of processor cores and save a huge amount of money on the overall cost of the server.

By: Leon McCalla

Leon McCalla — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 11:10:44 +0000

Reading your comments and looking at the chart and i have to say Intel was right to offer slightly slower servers at a slightly reduced cost. For Bank of America where money is not a concern and they need to process a billion transactions per second with distributed queries then every instruction cycle counts. For a small business owner where my longest query is an automated report generated daily that takes only 10 seconds, swapping processors to reduce my QTI performance only by 20% is a no-brainier. As you rightfully pointed out $746 per server is not a big savings but it is a weeks salary for an employee. In today’s economy these are the differences between operating a company and a operating a company efficiently.

Leon

By: Glenn Berry

Glenn Berry — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 14:55:10 +0000

In reply to Richard Lee.

Hi Richard,

I don’t want to see Microsoft go down that road. It would make licensing much more complicated, and probably would not yield that much revenue. It would also encourage more people to want to buy lower-performance processors.

Another question is how Microsoft would measure CPU performance. Something simplistic, like base clock speed can be quite misleading if you are comparing across different processor families.

By: Richard Lee

Richard Lee — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 12:36:51 +0000

Playing devils advocate here; do you think that Microsoft would benefit charging on a CPU performance basis? Or is that potentially the thin end of the wedge? (I don’t actually believe they should just would like to hear your thoughts on it (apologies if this was posted twice!)