How much is enough

Hello!
We are planing to release one bigger project... And buying larger, better
and faster sql-server to it.
How Big server do we need? What licenses?
We need it to build fast enough reports from 10-40 000 000 row tables.
Mainly use quite big tables and grouping it. We have coulple of thousand
users / hour using this on work hours via web clients... We have tested some
of tables, queries with our old sql and it's really slow on building reports
from those big tables, it takes hour to group by one query...
Main question is what kind of harware could give us bet performance to roll
up millions of rows in all most realtime? What kind od harware you have
with how big/many databases/users?
t
"TLehtinen" <timo@.raa.to> wrote in message
news:43de2349$0$26817$39db0f71@.news.song.fi...
> Hello!
> We are planing to release one bigger project... And buying larger, better
> and faster sql-server to it.
> How Big server do we need? What licenses?
> We need it to build fast enough reports from 10-40 000 000 row tables.
> Mainly use quite big tables and grouping it. We have coulple of thousand
> users / hour using this on work hours via web clients... We have tested
> some of tables, queries with our old sql and it's really slow on building
> reports from those big tables, it takes hour to group by one query...
> Main question is what kind of harware could give us bet performance to
> roll up millions of rows in all most realtime? What kind od harware you
> have with how big/many databases/users?
>
There's a lot you can do in design to make this cheaper. Analysis Services
is built for rolling up millions of rows and delivering fast queries against
the data. Indexed views can pre-aggregate data in SQL Server, and good
query design can help SQL Server deliver great query throughput.
You have a query that takes an hour to run. No amount of hardware will fix
that.
So, buy good, new hardware, but don't break the bank. Then you have a
"budget" of hardware resources. Use design, testing and performance
analysis to stay within your "budget".
For specific recommendations, go with SQL 2005 running on Windows Server
2003 x64 Enterprise Edition. For hardware, consider server like a Dell 6850
or an HP DL580. These are 4-way 64-bit (x64) servers, and if they can't
handle your workload, you need to fix your application.
David