PASS 2006 - Shared disk is not a scale out solution
At the end of the keynote today, Paul Flessner joined
Steve Balmer for a short Q&A. One of the questions was around SQL Servers
response to the Oracle RACK solution to provide a scale out solution.
Paul's response was that the Oracle solution is not a scale out solution
because the disk is shared and unless you partition your application well you
end up with contention over the global cache.
What Paul aluded to was that a scale out solution was originally planned for
SQL Server 2005 but was canned, favouring the progamability (SQLCLR) of the
server. However the work didn't stop. Paul mentioned that the preferred solution
would build on a commodity server policy much like database mirroring. This is
very much the architecture that is used for services such as Google and
Terraserver, when many commodity servers are used to scale out and also provide
redundancy.
So here's hoping that the solution, whatever it is, is delivered in
Katmai.
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