[AccessD] Windows can be so much fun

jwcolby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sat Nov 5 09:06:49 CDT 2011


 >I guess JC's in that 1% we're hearing so much about lately LOL.

LOL, I dream of winning the powerball just like the rest.

I actually borrowed $5000 as a business loan from my mother to build the first two servers in 2004 
in order to get this client.

In the first 16 months I grossed 10K and I was beginning to wonder if this client was ever going to 
"pay off".  I did everything on SQL Server completely manually and learned as I went.  SSMS was my 
biggest "enemy" as I struggled to figure out how do do all this stuff.

Understand that while I had recovered the cost of the hardware I was spending massive time "off the 
clock" learning how to do sql server and stuff.  I was extremely broke at that point and when the 
client asked "can you do this" I said "YES I CAN!" but hadn't a clue how I was going to do it.  I 
would bet I grossed about $10 an hour those first 16 months on that client's work.

I got the client in the first place because his business was with a company that gave him bad 
service.  He was "small potatoes" to this big service company and they would take days to give him 
counts and pass him from person to person within the company to service his account.

It was the fact that I did all of that prep and gave the client immediate service that caused him to 
eventually give me all of the business that had been with this other company.  In the next three 
years my gross from him increased 20K a year as I gave him what he needed and he placed more and 
more of his business with me.

In addition to all that I took C# and have since designed a custom application to automate the tasks 
that I have to do for him.  Now I actually bill for every hour spent and I even bill for "jobs" 
which take almost no manual labor.

Over the years my client has directly paid about 50% of the direct costs of the servers.  When I 
just didn't have the cash for $2K worth of raid controllers and disks I asked him to write a check 
for that and he did.  I didn't have the cash for the new server so he paid the up front cost to 
build the machine.  I later purchased additional memory, SSDS and such.  Understand that in the end, 
the client pays for everything, since anything that I buy comes after I pay my bills.

It wasn't hard to convince the client that his needs required more than a quad core and 16 gigs of 
memory.  I am doing sql kind of stuff, performing where clauses on as many as 20 fields at a time on 
tens of millions of rows, and joining together tables with tens of millions of rows, in order to get 
result sets of millions of rows which get exported to disk as fixed width files and csv files.  My 
poor quad core 16 gig machine was struggling!

SQL Server is incredibly efficient and the more cores and the more memory you throw at it the faster 
it gets.  By moving to compression I decreased the size on disk, decreased the disk I/O to get this 
stuff into memory and decreased the footprint of the data in memory so more stuff is loaded at a 
time, but you need processor power to do the decompression as the data is used in memory.  16 cores, 
64 gigs and compression allows me to literally load all of the relevant fields for the tables I am 
working with and turn my system into an "in memory database".  Even then it can take minutes to do 
some of the pieces of the processes I perform.

 >I guess JC's in that 1% we're hearing so much about lately LOL.

I would say that my client is solidly in that 1%, but I certainly am not.  The machines I have are 
just a requirement of the work that I do, not an indicator of wealth.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting

Reality is what refuses to go away
when you do not believe in it

On 11/5/2011 6:28 AM, Arthur Fuller wrote:
> Meanwhile, we pensioners subsist with a mere 4 gigs of RAM and a single
> duo-core processor. I guess JC's in that 1% we're hearing so much about
> lately LOL.
>
> Arthur
>
> On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Jim Dettman<jimdettman at verizon.net>  wrote:
>
>> <<As an example I built two "servers" back in 2004 for handling the SQL
>> Server database client.  The
>> technology I could afford at the time was AMD 3800 (single core), 4 gigs
>> RAM, Windows 2003 X32 and
>> SQL Server 2000 X32.  From there I upgraded the processor to dual core.  I
>> then replaced the
>> motherboard and moved to a quad core, upgraded to Windows 2003 X64 and
>> upgraded my memory to 8 gigs.
>>   Then I upgraded to 16 gigs.  Last year I built an entirely new system with
>> a dual socket AMD with
>> only one 8 core processor (one socket populated) and 16 gigs of memory.
>> Then 32 gigs of memory.
>> Then populated the other socket with another 8 core chip and 32 gigs of
>> memory.>>
>>
>>



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