Can someone please point me to any SQL server benchmarks for
small-to-mid-range machines (2 to 8 CPU Intel)? All documents I can
find are for big super machines like HP-Superdome.
I want to achieve about 500 to 1000 transaction per sec, My SQL server
database size will be in the range of 500GB. I have liberty to choose
multiple spindles.

Thanks

<goyald (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

Probably not. I believe most licensing from MS does not permit benchmarks
to be published.


Quite possible. I have a quad CPU machine with 700Mhz CPUs that does
100-300 inserts/sec at peak time.

That's on 4-5 year old hardware.

I think it'll raelly depend on the nature of your database, etc.

Lots of spindles are a must... especially put your transaction logs on a
separate raid-1 array. You may also want to look into partitioning parts of
your database into different files, each on their own set of spindles. Not
only may this help performance, but may make disaster recovery easier, etc.
(Especially under SQL 2005).

I'd probably also make sure I go for the largest L2 cache I could afford on
the CPUs.