SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

Shared server

Was just wondering if it’s possible to run sql server on a shared server. My new company has a server they usually only for file sharing. I was thinking that money could be saved by running sql server from that server rather than buying a completely different one. Rob Mills

Performance is likely to suffer as people access those shared files – there’s only so much that a server (or even a network card!) can do at a time. The cheap way out is usually not an efficient solution.

If the shared server is resouceful enough and lion share is allocated to SQL Server then you may have little chance on performance gain. By all means having a dedicated box will give you more reliability. Satya SKJ
Contributing Editor & Forums Moderator
http://www.SQL-Server-Performance.Com
This posting is provided â€œAS ISâ€ with no rights for the sake of knowledge sharing.

Thanks both of you for replying. I do agree that a dedicated server is best. I just wasn’t sure if sharing was an option or not. They’ve also got four locations connected via a WAN. I’m wondering how the performance would be of having one central server and all locations accessing that via the WAN. Rob Mills

BTW what kind of application you;re running and how big is the database & userbase? Satya SKJ
Contributing Editor & Forums Moderator
http://www.SQL-Server-Performance.Com
This posting is provided â€œAS ISâ€ with no rights for the sake of knowledge sharing.

Well right now that’s still being decided. I started at this job a couple weeks ago. What they’ve been using is a fancy excel template. But they realized that it was very limited and they wanted a database application. They want my input on what it should be built in. I’m pushing for sql server and .NET. My last job I was at I built in .NET and access. I really, really want to stay away from access. So I’m working really hard to convince them to use sql server. There’s four locations and at each location they’ll be roughly twenty to thirty users. The databases won’t be huge. We’re talking records less than 1 million. Not sure what size to estimate in terms of file size. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to fork out the money for a server at each location. I think that’s why they’re interested in access since it would be cheap to have a file at each local server. Any tips? Rob Mills

Depends on what kind of WAN connections (64kbit or 10Mbit etc) you have and how much data you intend to send over it (returning 10 or 10000 rows in small or big data sets) and what other traffic is going on over the WAN (email, file servers, file copy, daily backups etc). Try to get some bandwidth statistics over the current connections so you know what you have to work with. Then you know if you can work with connected or disconnected recordsets or need to optimize the application for slow network performance etc.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2000/plan/ssmsam.mspx for information. Satya SKJ
Contributing Editor & Forums Moderator
http://www.SQL-Server-Performance.Com
This posting is provided â€œAS ISâ€ with no rights for the sake of knowledge sharing.

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