Kendal Van Dyke

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 13 comments A + A -
Best Practices Performance SQL Server 2005 SQL Server 2008

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13 comments

Anonymous said...

Thanks for that. I can imagine that a lot of work has gone into getting these results, but it is going to save the likes of me a lot of guesswork.

February 10, 2009 at 4:52 PM
Anonymous said...

Good post. I ran similar tests and came up with the same findings e.g. "optimal configuration is a 128 KB RAID stripe, a 64 KB partition offset, and a 64 KB allocation unit size."

February 10, 2009 at 5:34 PM
Anonymous said...

BTW, my tests were done on an old compaq RA1000 DAS and a new HP MSA.

February 10, 2009 at 5:36 PM
Anonymous said...

Out of curiousity, has anyone tried a 256K stripe and if so, what offsets were tried? MS mentions in their article "Physical Database Storage Design" --
We recommend a 64 KB or 256 KB stripe size for most workloads. When the workload includes table and index range scans on tables that are larger than 100 MB, a stripe size of 256 KB allows for more efficient read-ahead.

October 28, 2009 at 12:27 PM
Anonymous said...

Great post, I´m going to try the same with 256 stripe size and different partition offset.

April 1, 2010 at 11:53 AM
Anonymous said...

Thanks for your hard work on this! It really clarifies how I plan to setup my array.

January 26, 2011 at 10:50 AM
Anonymous said...

When using a 128k stripe size, wouldn't your partition offset need to be 128k? In the last test I believe your performance with a 128k stripe is being negatively impacted by this.

February 21, 2011 at 12:14 PM
Anonymous said...

Will you waste disk space if your allocation unit (cluster) size is 64KB and your stripe is 128KB?

July 3, 2011 at 7:24 PM
Bob C said...

Great information. Now if I can just convince my SA to rebuild our SQL disks...

November 15, 2011 at 11:09 AM
Frank said...

Isn't the idea with the partition offset to align the partition with the stripe size so that your stripe reads are always aligned? Thus, it makes sense that the 128K stripe size is slower because you didn't do a fair comparison. The 128K stripe size should be fastest with a 128K partition offset. All of the stripe reads are unaligned with a 64K partition offset.

May 6, 2012 at 10:47 PM
Unknown said...

Has anyone done the same tests for a 64-bit MySQL database?

May 22, 2012 at 2:32 PM
George said...

Hi Kendal Van Dyke

read part 2 and 3 and am fascinated about the content the articles are providing.
My question is, why does partition offset increasing result in higher performance (I/O etc.)
Isn't so that the only reason of partition offset is to prevent misalignement.

Kind Regards

June 15, 2012 at 3:36 PM
Anonymous said...

Is this still relevant? Take a look at this:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd758814(v=sql.100).aspx

Win2K8 and Win2K8R2 and probably Win2012 already align to 1024KB for maximal compatibilty with stripe sizes up to 1024K. If anything it'd be interesting to see the same tests done with that alignment to see how it affects things.

Doubtful that the same hardware is still around, years later, just waiting for additional tests, though.

February 21, 2013 at 2:50 PM

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Kendal is a database strategist, community advocate, public speaker, and blogger. A practiced IT professional with over 15 years of SQL Server experience, Kendal excels at disaster recovery, high availability planning/implementation, & debugging/troubleshooting mission critical SQL Server environments. Kendal is a Senior Consultant on the Microsoft Premier Developer Support team and President of MagicPASS, the Orlando, FL based chapter of PASS. Before joining Microsoft, Kendal was a SQL Server/Data Platform MVP from 2011-2016. [About Kendal] (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9MNPJA4l6-fUucihu7dVXmOnHaSrHG-zuAhn6IXsjHqnZ2RJ4xSd3KNLMkYXnKcrDKORYVXxC1WGsrrt8s5U8k1atkLfg0xnLtZA6RbLt6qhppadMtWFJLRpNgg1zLjyG3qFeokfkc0xs/w139-h140-p/IMG_3503.JPG)