Chinese build the most powerful computer in the world

Cyber superstardom and the great super power race is on! 93 petaflop Sunway TaihuLight 93,000 trillion calculations per second. 1.31 PB of primary memory Advanced manufacturing, weather forecasting ,Life Sciences & big data analytics 10.5 million locally-made processing cores and 40,960 nodes , running on a Linux-based operating system. As a computer scientist , this must be an amazing challenge to write software which can exploit the capacity. Read a very interesting technical paper written by Jack Dongarra Related articles Find Table Scans in Query Plan Cache Memory grants and execution plans How to find CurrentClockSpeed and MaxClockSpeed using Powershell... Read more →

What is acceptable database server performance testing

A new storage vendor with a new faster way of storing and retrieving data pitches their product. Your company is interested in testing out the new platform. The new platform promises consolidation, more flexible provisioning of disk and disk tiers. They come to you as the DBA looking for a comprehensive test from the SQL Server perspective. From a workload perspective database servers tend to be high on the list of heavyweight IO consumers. It’s important at this point to understand the scope of the testing. 1) What exactly are you testing? Is the storage tier the intended purchase -... Read more →

SQL Server - Diary of a DBA – Num 8 – Failed Login attempts, Project Managers, Acceptance Testing

I introduced a SQL Server Failed Login Attempts report a couple of weeks ago. The purpose is to monitor , report and resolve issues discovered by the Failed Login attempts. For example, it could be a SQL Server Login attempt which shouldn’t be connecting to particular SQL Server or it could be an application with an errant connectivity problem . The plan is to work with the owners and slowly whittle down to essential Failed attempts. I’ve received significant resistance from owners : mainly because it’s extra work . Finally , this week I was vindicated as we discovered a... Read more →

TPC-H generate test data , test queries and sql database benchmark

I had some requests for my set up process notes for TPC-H . Includes : Installation , Import Data, Generate Queries This is a followup on my earlier post of SQL Server test data generation testing tools. Installation Install SQL Server Download the TPCH install files from http://www.tpc.org nstall MinGW . A GCC compiler , which includes MSYS – which are some development tools Follow these instructions http://gibson.tagus.ist.utl.pt/mediawiki/index.php/MinGW_setup Once you’ve compiled the dbgen.exe and qgen.exe Follow the instructions below. Generate Test Data In command line and in the folder containing dbgen.exe, write the following: dbgen –s 1 This will generate... Read more →