Today I want to consider an aspect of Microsoft SQL Server that I acknowledge I take for granted. When you consider the different applications that may be supported by the SQL Server engine(s), it is really quite amazing. You can use an embedded version, that may only run in memory. You can use a personal edition, freely distributable with your own applications. There is a standard edition that works well with smaller businesses. There is an enterprise edition, scaling up to very large size databases with lots of power, or even a data center edition where the scale can be quite massive. And, let us not forget the versions available in the Azure platform.
So, you are covering a lot of turf with a technology that has a common experience for a number of different needs. You may have a single core, or hundreds of cores, a small memory footprint to huge amounts of memory, and SQL Server is able to tune itself to work in these different environments.
What impresses me most of all is how well the engine self optimizes in these different environments. The needs are very different when you have limited memory. The options for performance improvements are increased with a large amount of memory. SQL Server handles more than just a simple baseline to optimize what resources are available. As a result, we as users have an experience that is rather amazing without having to learn a lot of tuning and optimization strategies. It just works out of the box.
Still, there are those times when you really need to get the most out of your database engine. Once again, SQL Server can be configured to do more than the baseline behavior as it is shipped. If you are willing to invest time you can learn how to optimize your instance of SQL Server in order to have it provide optimized performance for your specific needs.
I’m excited to see how much better SQL Server 2016 is, now that the final release is available. It will be even more amazing when new versions are released capable of running on Linux. Well, I’d like to say, “Hats Off” to an amazing product.
Cheers,
Ben