SQL Server 2008 Seminar: Become a Time Lord - Minimizing time and

space, while maintaining performance with SQL Server 2008.

A recent Gartner study has shown that OLTP databases grow on average 30% every year. This means, a 100 gigabyte database will be nearly 400 gigabytes in 5 years, over a terabyte in 8 years. As very large databases (VLDBs) become commonplace the management of unwieldy data sizes has become more than just a growing concern. In today’s environments, this is translating into millions upon millions of records, and managing this data has become a pain point for many DBAs. Archiving is rarely built into OLTP systems, more often than not, added as an afterthought.

This growth is often a direct result from the demand organisations have for more and more decision making information from their databases. Businesses today need this information to trend their business in an effort to gain competitive advantage. Also, current legislation requires organisations to keep transaction history for up to 7 years and the end result is databases growing to breaking point.

This presents the DBA with many interesting challenges. As data sets increase in size, so query performance decreases and larger amounts of memory are required or I/O bandwidth. Optimization jobs begin to overrun which compounds the issues, backup sets grow and backup windows become longer. While isolated storage is cheap, high availability I/O storage is often not, and this is where performance penalties often have the highest impact on OTLP systems, both to the organization and sanity of DBAs.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. With the advent of SQL server 2008 R2, Microsoft are finally acknowledging these challenges and have provisioned DBA’s with the tools needed to overcome them. SQL Server 2008 introduces powerful new features such as compression and resource governance while building on some of the successful features introduced in SQL 2005 such as partitioning.

As a Tier 1 database service provider DSP are perfectly positioned to give an insight into these issues and demonstrate techniques using SQL 2008 to overcome them.

Register for the next 16th of June 2010 and learn about:

• The problems with just investing in “Tin”
  
• Reducing space with new data types in SQL 2008
  
• Using filtered, sparse and other index techniques to reduce space and improve OLTP performance
  
• Using backup compression to reduce time and space
  
• Backup techniques for VLDBs
  
• Row and Page compression
  
• Partitioning - not just for warehouses! Learn techniques to provide out of box archiving and applications for OTLP databases
  
• Other new features with SQL 2008 R2