Fast Track Database Validation With Column Store Index (Csi); Reference Architecture Performance Details; Table 4. Performance Metrics - Dell PowerEdge External Media System 1434 Configuration

Dell SMB Reference Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Fast Track Data Warehouse on
PowerEdge R720xd
For the validated Fast Track configuration, the aggregate BCR was 950.75 MB/s.
During the evaluation cycle, the system configuration was analyzed for multiple query variants (simple,
average, and complex) with multiple sessions and different degrees of parallelism (MAXDOP) options to
arrive at the optimal configuration.

Fast Track Database Validation with Column Store Index (CSI)

SQL Server 2012 implements CSI technology as a nonclustered indexing option for pre-existing tables.
FTDW for SQL Server 2012 system design and validation is based on non-CSI benchmarks. FTDW systems
are designed to run effectively in the case that no columnar optimization is achieved for any given
period of time. Significant performance gains are often achieved when CSI query plans are active and
this performance can be viewed as incremental to the basic system design.
After the test configuration was validated, CSI was added and the I/O and the CPU saturation packages
were run. The configuration was analyzed for multiple query variants (simple, average, and complex)
with multiple sessions, degrees of parallelism (MAXDOP) set at 12 and Resource Governor memory grant
set at 19%.

Reference Architecture Performance Details

Table 4 shows the performance numbers reported for the recommended reference configuration.
Metric
FTDW Rated Data Warehouse
Capacity (TB)
FTDW Rated I/O (MB/s)
Benchmark Scan Rate Logical
(MB/s)
Benchmark Scan Rate
Physical (MB/s)
FTDW Peak I/O (MB/s)
FTDW Rated CSI (MB/s)
Table 4. Performance Metrics
Value Description
5 This capacity rating is based on "up-to" capacity
but adjusted to account for Fast Track Rated
I/O.
950.75 Core performance metric for validation. Is the
average of Physical and Logical I/O.
1156.5 Reflects actual user query throughput which
includes reads from RAM/Buffer cache.
745 Reflects physical IO read from disk during
benchmark.
1512 Maximum observed IO rate.
1662.5 Represents potential throughput using
Columnstore Index.
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