SQL Server Hardware - Red Gate Software

Chapter 3: Benchmarking Tools
Having read Chapters 1 and 2, you hopefully have a better understanding of server
hardware from a SQL Server perspective, and of how your hardware choices can be
affected by the types of SQL Server workload that must be supported.
However, as well as understanding the factors that will influence hardware selection
and provisioning, it is vitally important to measure and validate the performance of
the various major hardware components (such as the processor(s), memory, or disk
subsystem) as well as SQL Server itself, in order to verify that performance targets will be
met.
One way to evaluate and compare hardware performance, and to make sizing and
capacity estimates, is to use benchmark test results. There are many different kinds of
benchmarks in use today, but this chapter will focus on two main types, which are:
• application benchmarks – use one or more real applications (such as Microsoft SQL
Server) to measure the actual performance, throughput, and response time of an entire
system while running the application
• component benchmarks – focus on one or more components in a computer system,
usually using a synthetic workload that is designed to measure the absolute performance
of that part of the system.
We will discuss some of the industry standard database application benchmarks (such
as TPC-C, TPC-E, and TPC-H), including how they work and how they can be useful in
helping you evaluate and properly size database server hardware.
We'll then move on to the component benchmarks that you can carry out yourself and
that will help you to compare the relative performance of different components of the
system in a focused manner, without actually using SQL Server. For example, tools such
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