SharePoint Technologies

Scale to Meet the Most Demanding Workloads
SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise edition enables several dimensions on which it can scale, enabling even the most demanding SharePoint Server 2010 deployments. For example, rapidly growing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or Web Content Management (WCM) workloads may often require compute resources beyond those associated with traditional collaboration scenarios. SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise can support this scenario through a number of improvements, by enabling greater processor scale, the ability to address more physical memory on 64-bit hardware, and hot-add hardware support.
Processor Scale
When used as an ECM platform, SharePoint Server 2010 can become resource intensive and place heavy demands on the system as transactions are processed. The improved CPU support in SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise allows it to scale CPUs up to eight processors with no limitation on the number of cores, to more efficiently sustain and balance load under these and other demanding workload conditions.
Memory Scale
Physical memory scale and support is important when hosting a large number of sizeable content databases, particularly where performing upgrade and patching operations that are often resource intensive and depend heavily on both physical memory and TempDb. SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise can support up to 2 terabytes of physical memory to address today’s most demanding SharePoint deployments. High volume records management scenarios can be further supported by SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition in which physical memory is limited only by the operating system on which SQL Server resides.
Hot-Add Hardware Support
When considering virtualized topologies, you can further benefit from SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with hot-add hardware support. Hot-add hardware support enables administrators to dynamically add CPUs and physical memory to a live system, without having to stop database services. This support enables SQL Server 2008 R2 to scale seamlessly and minimize downtime when additional resources are required to support ever changing business requirements. As SharePoint Server 2010 becomes a mission critical application for both ECM and WCM workloads, scheduling downtime to add hardware or scale up can be difficult.
Resource Governor and Performance Data Collector
To more efficiently monitor and control the consumption of resources, SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition provides the Resource Governor. It enables administrators to gain control of the workload environment by defining workload prioritization, more granularly control inefficient queries, and allocate resources to the workloads where they are most required. SQL Server 2008 provides the Performance Data Collector, which enables an administrator to gather performance data from performance counters, dynamic management views, SQL Trace, and other sources.
To learn more about SQL Server 2008 performance and scalability, see SQL Server: Performance and Scalability (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/performance-scale.aspx).
Table Partitioning Improvements
The new Usage and Health Data Collection logging and Web Analytics reporting databases contain large tables. When SQL Server Enterprise Edition is installed, the large tables are partitioned onto separate file groups in order to improve performance and query efficiency. SQL Server 2008 improved how partitions are queried, so that you can expect fast and consistent query execution, no matter how many partitions are queried. SQL Server 2008 also provides the ability to escalate to a partition lock, which minimizes the impact of lock escalation without affecting queries on other partitions, thereby reducing downtime, and further optimizing performance.
Note: Table partitioning is only supported for the Web Analytics reporting databases.
To learn more about partitioning in SQL Server 2008, see Partitioned Table and Index Concepts (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190787.aspx).
To learn more about performance and scale in SQL Server 2008, see SQL Server: Performance and Scalability (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/performance-scale.aspx).