Tips for Using SQL Server 2000 64-Bit

SQL Server 2000 64-Bit Enterprise Edition allows SQL Server to take advantage of the 64-bit address space provided by the Intel Itanium 64-Bit CPU and Windows Server 2003 64-Bit Edition. You must have all three components--SQL Server 2000 64-Bit Enterprise Edition, Windows Server 2003, and Itanium CPUs--to make this all work.

SQL Server 2000 64-Bit Enterprise Edition includes 64-Bit versions of the SQL Server database engine, the SQL Server Agent, and Analysis Services. On the other hand, Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer and DTS Designer are still 32-Bit applications.

A new feature of SQL Server 2000 64-Bit Enterprise Edition is that the setup of the SQL Server database engine and Analysis Services can be done from a single setup program, instead of two separate setup programs. This helps to reduce installation time.

Previous versions of SQL Server 2000 were limited to 64GB of memory, and required the Windows 2000 Server Data Center edition. In addition, memory support above 4GB was not native, but required the support of the AWE memory extension.

SQL Server 2000 64-Bit Enterprise Edition, along with Windows 2003 64-Bit Edition natively supports up to 512GB of addressable memory, greatly enhancing SQL Server's scalability and performance. The biggest performance boost that SQL Server 64-Bit offers is the native support of large amounts of RAM. Increased RAM results in a larger buffer cache, which means that less disk I/O is required to operate SQL Server. In addition, additional performance benefits of SQL Server 2000 64-Bit Enterprise Edition included improved CPU and memory utilization. This is on top of the performance benefits gained by using Windows Server 2003 64-Bit Edition.

SQL Server 2000 databases are compatible with the SQL Server 2000 64-Bit Enterprise Edition, so migration should not be an issue. You can easily upgrade current databases by detaching and reattaching them, or by backing up and then restoring the database.

If you have a SQL Server application that uses more than 4GB of memory, or has maxed out its CPU and disk I/O capabilities, then you may want to consider moving to this new version of SQL Server. [64-Bit SQL Server 2000] Updated 4-1-2003