Did anyone use the 64 bit version in production with large databases?

Is it a better price/performance than the 32 bits version?

Any information if highly appreciated.

Thanks a lot!

Why do you want to us 64-bit? Where are you currently
bottlenecked? 64-bit will not guarantee you 2x or more
performance just because it is double the amount of bits.

For Analysis Services usage, and apps that use SQL Server
that require lots of memory for SQL Server, 64-bit is a
serious candidate. If you're processor bound, it may help
a little, but it's not the true benefit of 64-bit.

In terms of clustering, you can go to 8 nodes under 64-bit
as well.

Let me be more specific:
- it is used for running some stored procedures and calculate bills based on
some algorithm.
- it needs to process over 500,000,000 records from about 5-10 tables.
- the data will be imported/DTSed from files into the tables
- there will not be more than 2-3 users accesing the data
- the output of the process will be 1-2 tables with the result of the
calculation. These two tables will have about 1,000,000 recods together (or
each of them?)
- we need to be able to run the process in less than 1-2 hours

Unfortunately I do not have more than that. The project did not start yet so
we do not know all the details.

I'm trying to choose between 32 bit and 64 bit systems and also think for
the next 3-4 years. The system we are going to buy will not change in the
next 3-4 years but in this period of time MS will releases Yukon and maybe
Longhorn so I need to get all the benefits of these things.

More then number of input records may grow as much as 50% for the next 3-4
years.


"Allan Hirt" <allanh (AT) NOSPAMavanade (DOT) com> wrote

Hi Daniel,
The best way to see this difference is in TPC-C Benchmark
access www.tpg.org and look for servers with 64 bit
processor and 32 bit processors.
Today you have Intel Itanium 2 1.5Ghz / 6MB cache as 64
bits processor and Intel Xeon MP 2.8Ghz / 2M cache as 32
bits processor.
Look for executive summary for each benchmark to see
price/performance value.

Cesar Kubo
MCDBA - MCSE

That is still not enough information, because it can be
done in both arenas (32 and 64 bit). A lot of this will
depend on:
A) Your disk subsystem and its architecture
B) How the imports are done
C) The code written and algorithms, since I'm sure as you
know, using set theory, you can do 2 minues or 20 minutes
for the same task just by how you write something

Processing sounds to me like you may (or may not) be
processor bound.

To be honest, my advice to you would be consider the
above, buy a test system that is 32-bit that is reasonably
equipped, do some testing with your solution, and see if
you need to step up. Buying production hardware before
you've even written a piece of code or benchmarked is the
absolute wrong approach. To me, your disk I/O will
probably be bottleneck #1. That stands out more than the
number of bits on the processors.

Hi Allan,

You are right below and I am aware of many issue you raised. Unfortunately I
do not have more information at this point. I already proposed my managers
to do some research and also get more info before making a decision.

A new pice of info that may be important is the price of the software. I
just founf out that the licence for SQL Server is about $20,000 pe CPU which
is to much if we talk about a 4 CPU machine.

The other solutions are:
1. use free software, e.g. mySQL
2. write an app in C++ or C# that does the processing. We may not need a SQL
server for this project.

Thanks!
Daniel


"Allan Hirt" <allanh (AT) NOSPAMavanade (DOT) com> wrote

Well, SQL Server 2K EE is what it is in terms of cost ...
it always needs ot be factored in. If you need large
memory and processor support, you'll need Enterprise
Edition.

You could see if SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition, which
is 32-bit, could work for you if you don't have big memory
or processor issues.