Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Administration

Appendix A. Raymond James Lab Report

On October 10, 2005, Raymond James, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft went to the lab to evaluate the feasibility of upgrading the Raymond James data warehouse to SQL Server 2005. The evaluation took place in the HP labs on a Superdome and SAN environment similar to the one owned by Raymond James. One instance of SQL Server 2000 SP3 and one instance of SQL Server 2005 September CTP were installed and restored on a twelve-1.5GHz processor Superdome with 24GB of RAM and approximately 9TB of disk. The upgrade was performed by attaching and restoring the SQL 2000 SP3 databases to the 2005 instance. The objective of this test was for Raymond James to evaluate the amount of effort required to achieve benefits in areas of performance gains and reduction in maintenance time. The only preparation performed on the environment was that the statistics were updated on the SQL Server 2005 instance. Both of the instances shared the same resources, but only one of the instances at a time was active during the below tests. This ensured that only the versions of SQL Server were being evaluated as part of this test, since they were both running on the same hardware.

Please note that Raymond James and HP tracked resources consumes and time for each test. We obtained permission from Raymond James to share their findings along with their observations and executive summary.

Raymond James Financial (NYSE-RJF) is a Florida-based diversified holding company providing financial ...