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Hello, my name is Jamie Reding, and
I'm a program manager on the SQL Server team.
I'll be discussing the Microsoft Data Warehouse Fast Track Program.
The Data Warehouse Fast Track Program incorporates a test kit and
a methodology for analyzing data warehouse solutions.
It was designed to provide you with a proven system architecture when
building a data warehouse solution.
It will assist you in deploying data warehouse solutions for
reducing your cost, complexity, and risk.
The program is a joint effort between
the Microsoft SQL Performance Team and many of our hardware partners.
We work closely with them to ensure their reference architectures meet
the requirements of a modern warehouse solution and produce
fully certified, documented Data Warehouse Reference Architectures.
The underlying principle behind the Data Warehouse Fast Track Program is
to provide a holistic architecture across all components of the system.
The methodology we use ensures a balance among these key system
components.
We look at the processors, memory, and
the disk sub system to make sure they maintain the desired balance.
Data Warehouse Fast Track benchmark evaluates the entire platform as
a whole to establish a real bandwidth for each system component.
This component level evaluation ensures that each component provides
a sufficient throughput for the entire data warehouse workload.
If any component s under configured,
the raw system performance will be compromised.
This evaluation methodology also prevents over spending on
a component that is over powered for the rest of the configuration.
To inflict a data warehouse solution you have several options.
You can look at a homegrown or custom solution.
User reference architecture works with an appliance.
Let's look at these options when factoring the time to get
the solution up and running along with the cost associated with it.
And with the homegrown or custom solution,
the time to solution is very high.
It requires hardware installation, configuring the different
components, and finally doing tuning optimizations.
This can often be a very difficult process.
On the cost side, you'll have to procure both the hardware and
software.
With reference architecture, the time to solution is much lower.
You still must do the installation, configuration, and tuning.
But now you have documentation from the vendor illustrating the optimum
configuration and tuning settings.
This saves quite a bit of time.
The cost of a reference architecture can be similar to the home grown
solution, but the cost savings occur by avoiding overspending on one or
more components and having a out of balance system.
With an RA, the system is balanced from the beginning.
Finally, if you're looking at appliance,
the time to solution's very fast.
You roll the system in, plug it in, do some customization,
and you're up and running.
Cost wise, it's comparable to the reference architecture.
The Data Warehouse Fast Track process is very collaborative.
We work closely with the test sponsor to provide guidance during
initial configuration.
The test sponsors then run at least eight hours of data warehouse
specific workload tests.
We run multiple concurrent strings of simple, modern, and
composed queries.
The tool collects performance data for the entire system.
We analyze the results and then provide suggestions for
optimizing the platform.
When the result is complete, we'll certify the solution for
particular rated user data size.
And the test sponsor will include this certificate and
the documentation of the entire configuration.
This documentation includes a bill of materials and
all of the software and hardware settings which allow you to
replicate the configuration and the performance.
We work close to our traditional hardware partners like HPE, Lenovo,
CISCO, and Dell.
Data Warehouse Fast Track Programs also allow us to work closer with
our storage partners like SanDisk, Tegile, and NetApp.
Since IO is a very important component, they see the value in
having certified reference architectures for their customers.
From our partners using a very viable ecosystem,
which gives you the ability to choose your preferred vendor for
your data warehouse platform.
We also have RAs that span one, two, four, and eight socket systems.
This further increases your choices for a platform.
We also scale from 5 terabytes up to 145 terabytes of rated capacity.
Now, these RAs leverage the power of SQL Server, so
there's no compromise here.
You get a high powered data warehouse platform along with
all the great features of SQL Server.
And this charts a complex of all the curly published areas with
SQL Server.
You can see this span of results from 5 terabytes up to 145
terabytes.
Now even though this chart shows a current maximum rate
of capacity of 145 terabytes, the RAs can handle much more data.
We also calculate a metric called the maximum user data capacity.
This is based on total storage footprint of the system that can be
allocated to SQL Server.
When you factor in this storage,
the maximum data values range from 8 terabytes to over 1.1 petabytes.
We're not quite done with the Data Warehouse Fast Track Program.
We'll continue to evolve as new technologies become available.
We plan on adding workloads to stress the full suite of data
analytics.
We'll be adding support for R services as well as polybase.
In addition, we're reporting the fast track kit to support
Linux platforms.
We're now in the process of analyzing performance data to
provide data warehouse RAs for on-premise, VMs, and Azure.
Finally, we're looking at broadening the Fast Track Program beyond data
warehousing.
We would like to develop RAs for OLTP systems and
Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing, or HTAP systems.
HTAP is layering concert indexes on top of an OLTP database to
provide real-time analytics.
So these expansions of the Fast Track Program allow you to select
from RAs across a variety of data environments.
Thank you, and I hope you find the Data Warehouse Fast Track
architecture a valuable tool in building your data warehouse.
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