Scaling Up Your Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2008 R2
Writers: Eric N. Hanson, Kevin Cox, Alejandro Hernandez Saenz, Boris Baryshnikov, Joachim Hammer, Roman Schindlauer, and Grant Dickinson of Microsoft Corporation. Gunter Zink of HP.
Technical Reviewer: Eric N. Hanson, Microsoft Corporation
Editor: Diana Steinmetz
Published: June, 2008; Updated: December, 2010
Applies To: SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2
Summary: SQL Server 2008 introduced many new functional and performance improvements for data warehousing, and SQL Server 2008 R2 includes all these and more. This paper discusses how to use SQL Server 2008 R2 to get great performance as your data warehouse scales up. We present lessons learned during extensive internal data warehouse testing on a 64-core HP Integrity Superdome during the development of the SQL Server 2008 release, and via production experience with large-scale SQL Server customers. Our testing indicates that many customers can expect their performance to nearly double on the same hardware they are currently using, merely by upgrading to SQL Server 2008 R2 from SQL Server 2005 or earlier, and compressing their fact tables. We cover techniques to improve manageability and performance at high-scale, encompassing data loading (extract, transform, load), query processing, partitioning, index maintenance, indexed view (aggregate) management, and backup and restore.
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