SQL Server® 2008 Administration: Real World Skills for MCITP Certification and Beyond

Capacity Planning

After you've created the logical model and, potentially, the physical model, you'll need to ensure that you have a server that can support the resulting database. This demand forces the sometimes arduous task of capacity planning and analysis. However, the task doesn't have to be difficult, although it is repetitive when done manually. To perform capacity planning, you must estimate the size of every table and index in your database. The process for table size estimation varies slightly depending on whether you are estimating the size of a table without a clustered index (known as a heap) or a table with a clustered index.

In order to perform capacity planning, you will need to know the following facts about your tables and ...