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We have on overloaded database which is now receiving failed transactions consequently. The proposed solution is to create a 2nd database that taskes all the (ecommerce) transactions initially and processes & persists them. Then, eventually, the current/old database will be updated. That's the simple overview.

The question I have is - when I do the batch update from newDBServer -> OldDBServer every x minutes, won't it slow operations down on the old server during that update (assuming this isn't done overnight, etc...)?

The server is under a heavy load, so that's why I'm not certain it will really help minus the time in between updates. Is there a better way to do this?

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What kind of load are we talking about? perhaps the problem is hardware or lack of indexes or poor queries etc? – gbn Apr 20 '12 at 6:40
Don't know that yet, have a meeting w/ them tomorrow. But what was hinted via phone was that hardware may not be a possiblility. They are a pretty big ecommerce site with tons of hits... – bbqchickenrobot Apr 20 '12 at 7:37
Interesting. Once you hit a certain scale you often need to break out the database either functionally(customer database, profile database, sales database etc.) or activity based (reads separated from writes). More details please in order to expand the discussion. – John Sansom Apr 20 '12 at 12:03

1 Answer

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I agree with @gbn, can you share more details about what constitutes "load".

First take a look at your server level wait types to get a feel for where your resource crunch points are.

Also identify your poorest performing queries and those that are most frequently executed. These are where you should target your performance tuning efforts.

To get you started quickly, grab a copy of Glenn Berry's SQL Server Diagnostic Queries which contain a number of useful scripts that you can use.

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