SQL SERVER – Few Notes on Fast Track Data Warehouse

I recently delivered fast track data warehouse training. This training was very challenging as this training requires very specific hardware and extremely different way of looking at data warehousing. While training I have made few notes and I will now share the same notes with you. Please note that this are just notes and not learning material.

• Fast Track Data Warehouse has a primary emphasis on eliminating potential performance bottlenecks.
• It supports maximum of 48 TB data at this moment.
• Currently HP, Dell, Bull, IBM and EMC2 provides necessary hardware for Fast Track Data Warehouse.
• All the Software and Hardware comes in a single package.
• The Base OS is Windows Server 2008 and Base Database is SQL Server 2008 R2.
• FTRA stands for Fast Track Reference Architecture.
• SMP stands for Symmetric Multiprocessing.
• Fast Track is pre-configured and it just works out of the box.
• PDW stands for Parallel Data Warehouse.
• Fast Track Data Warehouse is based on Symmetrical Multi Processing (SMP) and PDW is based on Massively Parallel Processing (MPP).
• Each CPU Core delivers 200 MB per second data.
• This hardware architecture is available at $13,000 per Terabyte.
• It uses RAID 1 Mirror sets
• Recovery model of FTDW is recommended to Simple Recovery mode.
• Turn off AutoGrow for user defined database.
• Leave AutoGrow On for TempDB and set at 4 MB.
• Update the database statistics regularly.

I really had great time doing training for this subject. If you have worked with Fast Track Data Warehouse, what was your experience?

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)