Back in May I wrote about the poor performance of Microsoft's SQL Server product when doing trivial queries like simple key-value lookups. In such cases the massive overhead of the query engine led to return rates several orders of magnitude lower than many specialized KV systems, such as Memcached or Redis.
In most operational scenarios this isn't a big problem, as most queries are complex enough that the overhead diminishes to the point of irrelevance, and the "best route" of the query plan overcomes that inefficiency.
At the time I was testing with SQL Server 2008 and 2005. I finally got around to redoing those tests with SQL Server 2008 R2.
What a difference an R iteration makes.
Instead of 5,000 key lookups per second per caller, with 2008 R2 I'm seeing more in the range of 200,000+ simple lookups per second per caller. I've replicated this result on several installs.
Remarkably this has gone with little to no commentary in the community.
For larger queries the performance doesn't show such a deviation from the 2008 baseline, but for the simple purposes it really is incredible.
Please resend the email. Sorry for losing it, but both this blog and my email get a surprising amount of spam attention, despite the relative obscurity.
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Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.He is a vice president and lead software architect at an innovative New York City hedge fund back-office services firm.
Dennis has been working on solutions for the financial, telecommunications, and power generation markets for over 15 years.