DataSurge: When Performance Matters

HP Consulting

Northcliffe Newspaper Group

Hewlett Packard were engaged by Northcliffe Newspaper Group to provide advice on the performance and scalability of their new Sentinel advertisement system.

The system was built using Microsoft SQL Server and HP turned to DataSurge to provide consultancy services focusing on server build and SQL Server implementation.

We analysed their server system and provided a comprehensive report detailing many enhancements that could be made to their server setup to provide greater performance and resilience.

As a result, both HP and Northcliffe were very pleased with the professional service they received.

LloydsTSB Corporate Markets

As a direct result of the work carried out for Northcliffe, HP engaged DataSurge again to provide database consultancy to LloydsTSB Corporate Markets:

We successfully planned and implemented an upgrade from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005.

We then redesigned the Profit and Loss (PNL) and Risk database to cope with a 5TB database receiving Summit feeds including normalisation, denormalisation for performance enhancement using indexed views.

After this, we programmed Integration Services package to migrate data from legacy to new schema and programmed functions for hierarchy and network expansion.

We also developed standard automated builds of SQL Server 2005 for the group DBA team, including auto-detection of OS versions, multiple configuration choices and post-install hardening for x86 and x64 platforms.

We identified and solved a major infrastructure IO bottleneck boosting IO performance seven-fold replacing SAN mirroring to DR site with asynchronous database mirroring.

We then identified further hardware bottlenecks, analysed and suggested alternative hardware capable of 4 Gigabytes per second throughput!

A considerable amount of hardcore SQL query optimisation was involved resulting in many performance enhancements, including a 31 second processes reduced to <15ms and 12 min report generations reduced to 0.1 sec.

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