John W. Colby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sat Sep 11 11:10:08 CDT 2004
At this point I'm waiting for the price (and size) of memory to drop. I bought the 1g sticks and have 2 in each machine. I am not even finding 2g sticks and if they exist they are no doubt VERY expensive. AFAIK XP can only use 2g anyway so in order to use more than that I will need to somehow upgrade the OS. I looked at a dual cpu MB but the whole package was just SO much more that I couldn't swing it. The MB is 4 times more, the chipsets suck (old AMD chipsets), the processor is about 50% more for the same clock and require registered memory which are somewhat more expensive All in all it was going to just about double the cost / processor and in the end the second proc can ONLY be used in certain OSs and even then rarely add more than 50% speed increase, sometimes not that. I may go there down the road but for now Athlon64s in the socket 754 pin is the price performance sweet spot and only a few clicks back from the fastest out there. As for the log files... I am actually running 4 sata disks which are by definition on their own controller, plus a ide drive which of course is on a different controller so all that is covered. The motherboards have a gigabit nic and I just bought an 8 port switch so that is covered as well. Short of moving to full 64 bit I am as close to fast as I'm going to get. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Eric Barro Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 11:48 AM To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com Subject: RE: [dba-SQLServer] SQL Server is hopelessly slow John, This doesn't address your SQL server issue but... You may run into a problem installing Windows 2003 server on top of XP Pro. We tried doing that with Windows 2000 Pro and the Windows 2003 compatibility checker didn't want to install on top of the pro version. We tried it on a machine that had Windows 2000 server and it didn't have a problem. I'm guessing that in order to upgrade an OS to a server product you need to already have a similar server product on the machine. SQL server is known to be such a resource hog so the more CPU and memory you can throw at it the better it will (or should) perform. When we bumped our machine's memory to 2Gb and doubled the CPU power (by adding a second CPU) and installed a Gigabit NIC it was happy. We have it running on a Windows 2003 OS. I'm pretty sure though that it's running not a 64 bit processor platform. As I mentioned earlier, you should get a performance boost by splitting the read/writes for the data files and the log files if you have SQL server writing to a different controller/drive subsystem. --- Eric Barro Senior Systems Analyst Advanced Field Services (208) 772-7060 http://www.afsweb.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of John W. Colby Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 8:31 AM To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com Subject: RE: [dba-SQLServer] SQL Server is hopelessly slow >add it as the last column, otherwise EM will drop and rebuild the whole table Ahh, the price of ignorance. Thanks, that could be one of my problems. I just pushed all the fields down and added the field at the top (using EM table design view). John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Michael Maddison Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 11:21 AM To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com Subject: RE: [dba-SQLServer] SQL Server is hopelessly slow Sometimes it pays do do things 1 at a time in EM. I don't know what you've done but... try adding the field - add it as the last column, otherwise EM will drop and rebuild the whole table, save. then change the column to increment - save. Actually I've got a nagging suspicion that EM wont let you change the field once its saved... I can't test it here at home... see if that helps. cheers Michael M -----Original Message----- From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of John W. Colby Sent: Sunday, 12 September 2004 12:28 AM To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com Subject: RE: [dba-SQLServer] SQL Server is hopelessly slow I am not running Server 2003 YET. I have it, but I have to get the drivers for my motherboard loaded. The CD that comes with the MB does a system check at install and prevents loading unless the OS is in a list of supported OSs and Server 2003 is not in that list. Tech support for the MB company says the drivers should work so... I ended up loading XP Pro just to get up and running. I wonder if I could do an OS upgrade to Server 2003 over the top of XP Pro. Since the drivers are loaded, perhaps I could get it installed that way. I can certainly appreciate "a lot going on" but for example I tried to add an identifier field (auto increment long) to the table. AFAICT There just isn't any way to do that before the load so I have to do it when I am done. I started it running and THREE DAYS LATER my machine is still locked up. With no feedback from EM I have no idea if it will be finished in an hour or it is only on the 3 millionth row with 160 million rows to go? A few hours left or 3 years? This is no way to run a company! I re-imported a single set of 3 million records and am about to try setting up the identifier field on that subset and time how long it takes. However my first machine is still locked up trying to roll back the previous attempt on the entire database. Now I start this on my remaining fast machine. What if it locks that up for days on end? This is simply silly. There must be a way for SQL Server to write a status to a log file or SOMETHING. I just can't believe that this superpowerful whizbang database engine won't tell me whether it is doing something or simply on lunch break. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com _______________________________________________ dba-SQLServer mailing list dba-SQLServer at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ dba-SQLServer mailing list dba-SQLServer at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver http://www.databaseadvisors.com