I was reading a Microsoft propaganda rag on the tube on the way home last night (I've stopped buying the Evening Standard, because it spoils my read of the Metro the next morning… that, and the weird old dude who sells it at Canary Wharf reminds me a lot of Nuddley, my old housemate). Anyway, the following passage about SQL Server caught my eye (and will possibly mean little/nothing to non-nerds, so apologies for this):
“Secondly, it is blisteringly fast. Several years ago, Microsoft demonstrated a [data] cube that was created from 1.2 Tbytes of relational data and had a 7.7 billion row fact table. Given a 16 processor server with 3.8Gb RAM and 50 concurrent users half the queries rand in less that 0.08 seconds”
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but that's EXACTLY the kind of response I'd be expecting from ANYTHING running on a server with that kind of grunt ? Needless to say, the article hardly had me reaching for the phone to rush out and order my copy today.