I am looking to share experience with anyone who is using an FusionIO PCIe card with SQL Server. My specs are SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 with a lot of hard drive space and a 3 TB FusionIO card: HP 30000GB MLC PCIe ioDrive2 for ProLiant Servers.
My goal is to figure out the best use for the card, hopefully something less boring than tempdb. I have copies of multi TB databases on a server added to weekly or daily. They are used by analysts writing hideous ad hoc queries to learn about the data and users running hideous sprocs that use business rules developed by the analysts.
I am testing use of the FusionIO card with a heavily used db that takes up 80% of the card. I am testing to see if increased speed disappears entirely when making joins to tables off the card and if logs must be on the card to gain any speed for SELECT INTO.
So far I have found that
1. SELECT INTO with the db log on the card reduces run time by 25%
2. SELECT INTO with the db log off the card is a bit slower than having the entire db on hard drives only
3. SELECT of some columns from one db on the card with some WHERE clause is at least 10 times faster than the hard drives
4. Creating an index took 3 hours on the card and about 2 days on hard drives on a 4.5 billion row table.
5. SHRINK takes longer on the card.
FusionIO has a lot of stuff on their site none of which I could translate from random-sequential-iops jive into actual SQL use. So far their support staffs point me to this jive. I’m still not sure which perfmon counter to use to verity their iops performance standards.
My goal is to determine if the card is best used for ad hoc queries limited to tables on the card or if the card can be better used to speed up weekly builds of reporting datasets that will involve joins to tables off the card.
Our servers tend to have very idle cpu (64), sometimes idle memory (256 GB) and be severely IO bound. I know nothing about the IO controllers and little about hardware in general.
I also am thinking about the future cost and performance of more ioFusion cards vs a PDW.
carpe cras