Sql Server 2005 Enterprise ((top)) -

“That’s Enterprise,” Lena said.

ALTER INDEX IX_Shipments_ETA ON Shipments REBUILD WITH (ONLINE = ON); Marcus stared. The table remained live. Insert queries continued. Updates flowed. The index rebuilt itself in the background like a mechanic changing tires on a moving truck.

“I’m giving you a lifeline,” he replied. sql server 2005 enterprise

“We stopped treating your data like a spreadsheet,” she said.

Their flagship product—a logistics tracker for intermodal freight—was running on SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition. The database had grown to 350GB. Every night, the indexing job took four hours. Every morning, the dispatchers in Chicago and Rotterdam would sit staring at spinning hourglasses while containers piled up at ports. “That’s Enterprise,” Lena said

“No,” Marcus laughed. “We just taught the database how to read a calendar.”

CREATE PARTITION FUNCTION pf_Weekly (datetime) AS RANGE RIGHT FOR VALUES ('2006-01-01', '2006-01-08', ...); Suddenly, a query for last Tuesday’s data touched only one partition. The I/O dropped from 800 MB to 12 MB. Dispatchers called the helpdesk: “Did someone upgrade the network?” Insert queries continued

That night, Lena and her junior admin, Marcus, installed the new instance on a dual-socket Itanium server—a beast of a machine that had been gathering dust in the data center.