| Peter Nolan 2005-05-16, 1:23 pm |
| Hi MZeeshan,
I see this type of question so often it is the #1 question on my faq page...
http://www.peternolan.com/Default.aspx?tabid=56
SQL server has come along quite nicely since 6.5 (which was a DW
disaster)......if you consider you need about 10x disk to raw data you can
get up around the 50GB of raw data (.5TB disk) on a good sized server.
I did a 200GB disk DW on SQL Server 7 about 5 years ago now and it was fine
as long as you were prepared to work at it.....I expect that 2000 is much
better (but I haven't built one on SQL Server 2000 as I've been using other
databases). I use 2000 on a regular basis for prototyping and a number of
my clients are using 2000 and they all tell me it's fine as long as you
don't want to do something too large......I am sure plenty of people trying
larger databases now on 2000.......our biggest problem was getting the
optimiser to optimise queries properly......the whole batch processing side
etc worked extremely well.....in fact SQL Server outperforms oracle
consistently in batch processing for the ETL portion on all the lower end
PCS I use...(low end being 2.6 GHz Pentium IV with 2GB memory.) I do have a
2 CPU acting as 4 CPU 4GB HP machine I have been playing with with 200GB
disk in it and it goes quite nicely.
My own view is if you have 50GB or less of raw data you need to really want
to use the functions of DB2 or Oracle to be able to justify not using sql
server.......
My other advice is to build the DW such that you can move it at minimal
cost....that way you can 'keep the vendors honest'.. ;-)
Peter Nolan
www.peternolan.com
"MZeeshan" <mzeeshan@community.nospam> wrote in message
news:C4167D98-F4B1-4FC5-A8C5- 80EA9E1C1856@microso
ft.com...
> In our company, we have DB2 (currently moving from Informix) on Unix and
> SQL
> Server on Windows are the two primary database engines.
>
> Now, when top management decided to select a server for upcoming data
> warehouse project, they selected DB2 because of more stability and again
> an
> understanding of SQL Server as more midlevel database vs. DB2 for higher
> end
> processing.
>
> I was thinking that SQL Server has come up a long way from its origins.
> And
> that is the basis for my following questions:
>
> 1. What is the maximum size of database that can be recommended for an
> Enterprise Datawarehouse? (our estimate is 1 TB)
>
> 2. What are the limitations for total number of dimension/fact tables?
>
> 3. What are the hardware requirements for such a system (based on #1 and
> #2)?
>
> 4. Can their be some tabular comparison available b/w SQL Server and DB2
> on
> some of those standard benchmarks? I checked the comparison page and saw
> some
> of the videos but I am looking for some concise information.
>
> 5. Are there any companies who are successfully implementing SQL Server
> based data warehousing solutions? who are they and how big are their
> datawarehouses.
>
> 6. Will there be any improvements in SQL Server 2005 in this regard?
>
> Any help is welcome!
>
> --
> Regards,
> MZeeshan
|