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SQL Server tempdb and solid state drives

02 April,2011 by Tom Collins

Implementing SSD on the SAN has advantages such as hardware redundancy – but also limitations – i.e the data must first navigate CPU to drives – with the various limitations.

 An alternative is to plug the SSD directly into the PCIe bus. The benefit  is that IO will  bypass the  drives and RAID controllers . This type of SSD has it’s own controller , with  the bandwidth dedicated to the drive – avoiding SAN contention and freeing up bandwidth for SQL data and logs.

This should amount to a greater and faster  number of IO operations per second .OCZ and Fusion-IO are two examples of manufacturers

 This is not practical for all types of SQL Server files – for example , would you want the Primary filegroup on a drive that is not part of the hardware redundancy schema. ? There are risks involved in not choosing the right files to use on a SSD drive.

But there are files , such as the TEMPDB –  where there is good performance improvement  potential. To assist in deciding Monitor SQL Server TempDB usage - SQL Server DBA

Firstly , the TEMPDB is rebuilt every time the SQL Server restarts – no permanent data is maintained . The type of activity on TEMPDB is of a temporary nature – such as : temp tables, index rebuild, table variables, xml variables. TEMPDB  is also a spillover space for sorting data, group by, snapshot isolation and  large joins

 This type of activity works well with SSD on the PCIe bus . If the server crashed and was not recoverable – TEMPDB could be rebuilt – with minimal risk .TEMPDB does not have to be represented onto another server – as there is no permanent data .

If redundancy is required for this type of drive – then a software RAID solution would need to be considered.

 This solution would not work for clustering – as the clustering requirement is that all drives are remote to the server. You could potentially develop a workaround – but based on the SQL Server 2005 \ 2008 documentation  - maintaining a local drive is not supportable.

This does not apply to LAN based SSD – which are considered to be remote

Read More

TempDB performance and strategy checklist

Shrink tempdb without sql server restart


Author: Tom Collins (http://www.sqlserver-dba.com)


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