October 2020 Meeting

SQL Server 2019 and Persistent Memory: Performance and Scale

Description:

Data volumes have exploded. There is much more data at rest than ever before with only a small amount of the ingested data ever processed. Intel estimates that this is less than 1% of the volume ingested. Yet, we continue to produce data at record levels and systems can barely keep up to meet the demands.

In this session we will cover some of the benefits of a hyper-converged infrastructure, Storage Spaces and Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2019, the capabilities of Intel Optane™ DC Persistent Memory, and how SQL Server 2019 can build upon these technologies.

Intel Optane™ DC Persistent Memory is an innovative memory technology that delivers a combination of large capacity storage and support for data persistence. Persistent Memory can help with increased capacity needs and unique memory modes, lower the overall total cost of ownership while maximizing virtualization densities, and increase memory security with automatic hardware-level encryption.

Persistent Memory can be a powerful technology for larger systems such as SQL Server, SharePoint, and private cloud deployments.

We will cover how SQL Server can take advantage of Persistent Memory today and where the opportunities lie for all supported versions.

We will cover SQL Server data access performance (block access), persisted log buffer (tail-of-log caching), ‘enlightened’ I/O (with Direct Access), and Hybrid Buffer Pool capabilities.

Finally we will address the scenarios where applications and platforms can best take advantage of hyperconvergence with persistent memory as a complete solution – a foundation to build upon.

Speaker Bio: Brian Carrig

Brian Carrig is a Microsoft Certified Master of SQL Server and is currently a Site Reliability Engineering Manager on the DevOps team at Citrix ShareFile. In a previous life, Brian spent some time as an academic and holds a PhD in Computer Science. He is a native of Dublin, Ireland but now lives with his wife and two daughters in Cary, North Carolina. If he is not talking about, thinking about or working with technology you will usually find him watching Chelsea FC.