Let me preface this by saying that I am not a full time DBA, I am more of a network admin / light developer.
BACKGROUND: 18 months ago I was given the project of "band-aid" fixing a reconciliation application that was outgrowing Microsoft
Access. The database where the main table lived continually outgrew 2GB in size, causing them to split into separate files and made things increasingly difficult.
There was quite an extensive front end in access with various queries that queried queries that dumped files to process the information this
department needed to process on a weekly basis. To get around this size limitation, I re-wrote the import process so that the file they receive daily gets imported into a SQL database. Then, each user has an ODBC link to the SQL Express database, and the Access
database (with a few modifications) links to this 1 large table. I knew this was a quick fix kind of thing, and that was what was expected of me at the time.
This was running on a Windows XP workstation, SQL 2008 Express with 4GB RAM.
FAST FORWARD: We recently upgraded our VMWare environment, and I am looking to move this database onto a virtual machine with more resources.
Yesterday I built the VM, Windows 2008 R2 OS, 8GB RAM, 4 vCPUs. I took a restore of the SQL Express database to the 2008 R2 VM machine.
I thought I would do some quick comparisons. So the largest table in the database has 13.8M rows (16 Columns). I just did select * from
mydb.dbo.bigtable.
The SQL Express, Win XP machine finished 20-40 sec before the Win2k8R2, 2008R2 SQL, 8GB RAM VM. I would have guessed the VM would have performed
better.
Thinking that the difference in memory was not enough to see some drastic results, I upped the RAM in the VM to 24 GB, just to see. The
query took longer than it did when I had 8GB ram?!?
I will say that I know how to install SQL server, I know how to query data, write t-sql, functions, etc - but when it comes to fine tuning performance on a SQL server, I don't really know where to start.
Does this make sense? Is there something that I need to do for SQL to make use of the extra resources?
Thanks in advance
sb