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SQL Server Tips by Burleson |
Storage Structure Planning
While this type of planning generally involves the creation and
placement of filegroups and files, one must be careful to not put
the cart before the horse. Hardware should be scrutinized first. As
was already mentioned above, disk I/O contention must be avoided
where possible, so having several disks available to plot out the
map of the database is good idea.
At the hardware level, the usual discussion centers on whether to
use a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) technology or just
a bunch of disks (JBOD). Complicating the decision on what type of
RAID to use is that many of the hardware vendors offer smart storage
technology that promises to give the DBA the best of both possible
worlds.
For example, most DBAs know that write-intensive storage structures
should not be placed on a RAID5 setup because of the write penalty
that RAID5 imposes. Therefore, the DBA should try to place all
transaction logs, TEMPDB databases, and other write-intensive
objects on non-RAID5 devices, with the best configuration normally
being RAID0+1.
However, a number of hardware vendors claim to have “auto” or
“smart” RAID storage devices that offer the protection of RAID5 with
the write speed of a RAID0 or RAID1 device. Before going down this
route, the DBA should investigate and test the claims of such
devices to see if they actually produce the claimed results.
The above book excerpt is from:
High-Performance SQL Server DBA
Tuning & Optimization Secrets
ISBN:
0-9761573-6-5
Robin Schumacher
http://www.rampant-books.com/book_2005_2_sql_server_dba.htm |