Achieve higher levels of database scalability with SQL Server 2005 (64-bit), the enterprise-class database optimized to run on x64- or Itanium-based servers and Microsoft Windows Server 2003. The 64-bit features are available on SQL Server 2005 Standard, Enterprise, and Developer editions.
SQL Server 2005 for Itanium-based Server Systems
SQL Server 2005 for Itanium-based systems focuses primarily on scale-up, enterprise-class servers running high-scale, high-concurrency database applications. With SQL Server 2005 currently delivering the top levels of scalability across the SQL Server product line, organizations can expect the highest throughput performance for their most demanding business applications. With improved high-end symmetric multiprocessor systems finding their way into the largest enterprises, SQL Server will also be able to support the most critical tasks with ease.
Performance and Scalability
Since being introduced in April 2003, the 64-bit versions of SQL Server have continually proven to the market that they provide more than sufficient headroom for the most intensive business and computing applications. Together with Windows Server 2003, SQL Server continually provides top-of-the-line performance at compelling cost levels for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications. On Itanium systems, SQL Server 2005 has scaled past 1,000,000 transactions per minute (tpm-C), with the best price and performance rating on Windows. In fact, on similar hardware such as a 64-processor Intel Itanium 2 server, SQL Server 2005 has 7 percent better performance at 37 percent lower cost compared to Oracle 10g.
Other significant benchmarks of performance and scalability include the following:
World-record performance among 32-way servers in the SAP R/3 Sales and Distribution (SD) two-tier benchmark. This system supports 5,210 concurrent users with response times sustained to less than 1.93 seconds.
World-record performance for 30,000 concurrent users combined with 12 million integration transactions per day on Siebel eBusiness Application Suite.
SQL Server 2005 for x64-based Systems
Today’s x86 servers are making the jump to the next level of scalability and performance. While maintaining their strong qualities of ease of use and outstanding value, extensions have been introduced by processor manufacturers to include 64-bit functionality. These systems have been named by Microsoft as “x64” servers. With processors from AMD (AMD64) and Intel (EM64T), organizations will now be able to run both 32-bit SQL Server and 64-bit SQL Server on these new hardware platforms.
Database deployments on x64 servers are expected to support midrange to rapidly growing high-end database server demands. Offered at a price band targeted for the vast majority of organizations with fast-growing server needs, x64 servers will allow companies to experience a unique mix of affordability and excellent performance with SQL Server 2005.
Flexibility for Both New and Seasoned 64-bit Customers
SQL Server 2005 running on x64 servers provides a unique advantage for companies that are just getting into 64-bit technologies and those who are rapidly growing their database servers. Organizations currently on 32-bit technologies are able to run their 32-bit database on an x64 server either in two ways. Companies running a 32-bit Windows operating system can run the database in 32-bit native mode. Companies running an x64 server in 64-bit mode can run the database in the Windows-On-Windows (WOW64) segment of a 64-bit Windows operating system. This flexibility allows users who may not be immediately ready to migrate their database application to 64-bit to still use the new x64 servers today, and phase in their migration to native 64-bit database deployments at their own pace.
Improvements in SQL Server 2005 That Take Advantage of 64-bit Technology
Traditionally, extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes have coped with large data integration by conforming and loading the data into the target server in multiple phases. This was managed with 32-bit ETL processes by having the database complete a two-step process involving staging and loading the data. As it stages the data on the database server, the database performs all the aggregation, sorting, and other operations, potentially contending with other equally important queries on the database server that use the common resources. As data volume grows with increasingly complex aggregations, memory pressure on the database server rises, causing data to be swapped out to disk when large data sets cannot fully fit in the memory.
With native 64-bit technology, now only will organizations using SQL Server Integration Services be able to conform the data, but will also be able to do all the aggregation and sorting of the entire data set in the memory, eliminating the penalty of having to swap out to disk. Being able to load larger data sets in direct addressable memory not only optimizes throughput, but frees up the database engine to serve other equally important queries and workloads.
Performance speeds during aggregation and processing of large amounts of online analytical processing (OLAP) data are greatly enhanced on a 64-bit version of SQL Server. The ability to cache larger amounts of data without the need to store data in a temporary database allows precached data to answer frequently issued queries. Additionally, as the query scale increases to enterprise levels, requiring calculations and processing over data sets larger than 3 gigabytes, and as the number of concurrent users accessing the data with these complex queries increases, 64-bit Analysis Services will be able to store and process more data in memory. This speeds up the overall throughput and provides fast and rich answers to business analytics questions.
Eliminating data contention and deadlocks is an important performance goal for business-critical applications. In instances where workloads perform long-running queries or batch jobs, memory can be a bottleneck as these queries put locks on data sets for extended periods. As these data sets get too big for conventional 32-bit memory addressing to handle, performance is hurt by swapping portions of data in and out of disk. SQL Server 2005 snapshot isolation on 64-bit platforms eliminates these challenges and radically improves performance by allowing larger quantities of data to be processed by the query in memory. SQL Server 2005 (64-bit) servers run extremely large queries concurrently with optimal results—an important benefit to organizations.
Performing multiple and complex operations on large data tables has been a challenge for many enterprise workloads. Database administrators have tried to surmount this challenge by partitioning—or splitting up—a large table into multiple units. These partitions can then be accessed independently, decreasing the performance impact arising from I/O bottlenecks when accessing large amounts of data (especially data sets larger than 3 gigabytes) from these tables. Because of memory-addressing limitations of 32-bit database instances, extremely large partitions had to spread across multiple instances of SQL Server. With 64-bit technologies, the memory addressability limitation within a SQL Server instance is eliminated, providing demanding workloads to keep the partitions within the same server or instance, and processing the data in memory without the limiting the impact of I/O.
