Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

This is just a quick announcement to point out that I have done a little format clean-up on the blog. The blog is about clustering and other platform topics related to Oracle, but the fact of the matter is that most IT shops that care about Oracle platform (especially clustering) topics also likely deploy non-Oracle databases.

So, I am going to start posting some stuff here along those lines. Yes, the first thing I’ve just posted there is about SQL Server 2005 consolidation and scale-out (shared database concurrent) reporting with SQL Server 2005.  This page has a whitepaper that covers new SQL Server 2005 functionality which allows databases in the PolyServe Database Utility for SQL Server to scale-out for concurrent reporting on up to 16 servers in the cluster. Switching from normal OLTP mode to scale-out reporting mode does not require any replication or structural changes to the data and the mode change occurs in less than 1 minute. Switching back to normal OLTP mode is just the opposite operation and also takes less than one minute. There are no physical storage manipulations (e.g., filesystem remounting) and no server reboots involved.