Fast Track Foundations: Get Serious about Sequential I/O
Fast Track is a new reference data warehousing architecture provided by Microsoft. More than this it represents a new way of thinking about data warehousing. A Fast Track system is measured by its raw compute power - not by a DBAs ability to tune an index. Fast Track is an appliance-like solution that delivers phenomenal performance from a pre-defined, balanced configuration of CPU, memory and storage using nothing but commodity hardware.
Of particular interest in a Fast Track system is the way in which the storage and SQL Server are configured. To achieve the fantastic throughput without using SSDs requires some careful configuration. This configuration is designed to make use of Sequential I/O to dramatically improve disk I/O performance.
Interested? If you have a large data warehouse that's seen better days or perhaps you are about to embark on a new warehousing project then you should be! Fast Track is a great solution with a fantastic value proposition.
In this one hour session we'll aim to get under the skin of Fast Track and get some answers as to how it delivers such great throughput on commodity hardware. In the process we'll aim to answer the following questions:
- When might I need Fast Track?
- What is Sequential I/O?
- How does Sequential I/O improve performance?
- What do I need to do to get Sequential I/O?
- How can I monitor for Sequential I/O ?
- What may I need to change in my ETL to get the benefit of sequential I/O?
Allan Mitchell will be showing how to build SSIS packages to take advantage of sequential IO performance.
Still reading? I'll save you a front row seat....
Speaker focus
James is an Advisory Consultant at EMC Consulting. His focus has been the development and technical direction of major, mission-critical, pan-European projects in the enterprise. His experience includes data and system architecture, information analysis, logical and physical database modelling and design, highly available implementations, ETL process architecture and client tools implementations including a number of major bespoke applications. He has worked in IT since 1998 and with SQL Server since 6.5.