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Best SSD for a 750MB quickbooks database?

L

LxMxFxD4

Senior member
I have a client who has this enormous quickbooks database.. but enormous by quickbooks standards is 750MB 🙂

Anyway, they experience extreme slowness when savign (writing) a transation and refuse to reduce the size of this thing. They are running this DB on a 160GB drive which may not even be SATA, but I think it is.

I just upgraded them to windows 7 ultimate from vista ultimate, so I think the best solution woudl be super fast WRITING / random writing SSD.

Since the DB file is only 750MB any size will do, and probably wont need a raid solution here. Thoughts? Recs?

We're talking disk queue lengths in the hundreds here when saving a transation!
 
time to move up. listen i've got a zillion year old MAS90 system that has 15 years of data on it and its lightning fast.

I'd suspect you have some other issues as well. database optimization and placement.

SLC for business or go home 🙂
 
Emulex said:
time to move up. listen i've got a zillion year old MAS90 system that has 15 years of data on it and its lightning fast.

I'd suspect you have some other issues as well. database optimization and placement.

SLC for business or go home 🙂
Click to expand...

I wish dude, I wish. This is a client who has 175,000 purchase orders in a single quickbooks file. Have you ever dealt with a small business? IT is like, their last priority. Sad but true and it WILL eventually bite them in the ass.

I wont be able to sell them on a $400 SSD. I was thinkign the $150 one. Any in that range taht anyone recommends for a small but very intense database?
 
no dude sql servers pound the crap out of writes (log then database). MLC for business is slated mid/end of this year - as in MLC - maybe they are 600gb X25-M G3 with 50% reserved for bad blocks. it's coming - trust me - just not right now.

thats not many po's either. lol.

they getting any paging? anything else running on that server? all 3.2gb (or more) for the database server?

the biggest factor in database is ram. stupid amounts. I ran into a situation where i commissioned an older server with 8gb ram max. Well after a month of hell a new machine with 48gb is replacing it. thank the lord. you'd be suprised at how much better things can be when indexes can sit around in ram all day 🙂

.75GB sql-based database??? the 8gb box has 80GB database and things only get slow when doing massive ETL's and then re-indexing after bulk's.
 
AGAIN this is a quickbooks database. IT IS NOT SQL. It is quickbooks. Flat and horrible.

As for ram, the system has 4GB and quickbooks doesn't use much ram.

Interestingly this thread did give me an idea - Since its such a small database - try putting it in a RAM DISK?

What software would you recommend to try this?
 
LxMxFxD4 said:
AGAIN this is a quickbooks database. IT IS NOT SQL. It is quickbooks. Flat and horrible.

As for ram, the system has 4GB and quickbooks doesn't use much ram.

Interestingly this thread did give me an idea - Since its such a small database - try putting it in a RAM DISK?

What software would you recommend to try this?
Click to expand...

Just to quote myself..

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

$60 for ramdisk plus. I will try this out on the system immediately and post the results!
 
LxMxFxD4 said:
$60 for ramdisk plus. I will try this out on the system immediately and post the results!
Click to expand...

A ramdisk will undoubtedly work great . . . until your system crashes or shuts down without saving.

For business-critical work, you cannot rely on a software ramdisk.

Stick with the OCZ Vertex or somesuchthing

edit: if you really insist on a software ramdrive, you can use this one free:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/
 
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Well,

Not surprisingly the slowness issue is COMPLETELY resolved putting the 750MB file on a 1GB RAM DISK using ramdisk plus. Super speedy and almost transparent saves.

At least I have 100% for certain isolated the problem - slow disk!

Now, obviously thsi ramdisk scares me a lot - any kinda power loss and all records between backups will be lost, etc. There any way around this that is actually viable?
 
LxMxFxD4 said:
Well,

Not surprisingly the slowness issue is COMPLETELY resolved putting the 750MB file on a 1GB RAM DISK using ramdisk plus. Super speedy and almost transparent saves.

At least I have 100% for certain isolated the problem - slow disk!

Now, obviously thsi ramdisk scares me a lot - any kinda power loss and all records between backups will be lost, etc. There any way around this that is actually viable?
Click to expand...

Maybe an UPS? I'd see how fast an SSD is in comparison - might be fast enough to still be viable. There might also be some of those old PCI cards that had a battery and RAM slots. One of those might work perfect. Forget who made them though.
 
Getting an SSD will obviously fix the problem, but maybe not as fast as ramdisk. If you do get SSD, be sure to get one with fast random read/writes like an Intel or Sandforce derivatives (OCZ Vertex 2, Patriot Inferno, Corsair Force, etc). That will alleviate the slowdowns dramatically.

I don't think there's any need for Intel X25-E enterprise grade SSDs since this is a small business and not an enterprise level business. Any typical SSD should be reliable enough for your purposes.
 
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kevinqian said:
Getting an SSD will obviously fix the problem, but maybe not as fast as ramdisk. If you do get SSD, be sure to get one with fast random read/writes like an Intel or Sandforce derivatives (OCZ Vertex 2, Patriot Inferno, Corsair Force, etc). That will alleviate the slowdowns dramatically.

I don't think there's any need for Intel X25-E enterprise grade SSDs since this is a small business and not an enterprise level business. Any typical SSD should be reliable enough for your purposes.
Click to expand...

The reason I'm not too keen on a UPS solution is that the people who enter the data aren't IT people, they're office workers. They wont know to "go save the ram disk in the event of a power outage" type of deal. I do consulting/remote work so I just imagine this being a serious headache eventually for me.

I will put the thing on an SSD and see what happens. Fry's has a few in stock and I will look for the best performing one for random writes.

I'll post back here with my results in a couple of days.
 
i assume you have a battery/flash back write cache raid controller with 256 to 1024mb of cache? along with a nice enterprise storage drive pair (146gb sas) you probably would see your problems go away.

and an sua1500 smart-ups isn't too costly to keep your systems up long enough to get a clean shutdown along with other ancillaries (phone pbx,routers/switches/etc).
 
Emulex said:
i assume you have a battery/flash back write cache raid controller with 256 to 1024mb of cache? along with a nice enterprise storage drive pair (146gb sas) you probably would see your problems go away.

and an sua1500 smart-ups isn't too costly to keep your systems up long enough to get a clean shutdown along with other ancillaries (phone pbx,routers/switches/etc).
Click to expand...

must have missed the part about the $150 budget 😉
 
LxMxFxD4 said:
Well,

Not surprisingly the slowness issue is COMPLETELY resolved putting the 750MB file on a 1GB RAM DISK using ramdisk plus. Super speedy and almost transparent saves.

At least I have 100% for certain isolated the problem - slow disk!

Now, obviously thsi ramdisk scares me a lot - any kinda power loss and all records between backups will be lost, etc. There any way around this that is actually viable?
Click to expand...

As the file is not very big I don't think it would be too much pressure on the system to backup the file every hour or so?

All you would need to do is find something to schedule it to a folder, keep the 3 latest copies then overwrite.
 
LxMxFxD4 said:
The reason I'm not too keen on a UPS solution is that the people who enter the data aren't IT people, they're office workers. They wont know to "go save the ram disk in the event of a power outage" type of deal.
Click to expand...

Doesn't the RAMDISK software have an option for saving on shutdown? You can set that, and set up a UPS to do a shut down when power goes out.
 
Upgrade to Quickbooks Enterprise that uses SQL. 😛

Using a RAMdisk is extremely risky with a desktop PC with non ECC ram. Even using ECC (server/workstation board) and a UPS IF the PC gets a BSOD your database is toast. This is why BBUs are used on RAID hosts with large cache. Even with a UPS it's still possible to lose uncommitted cache data!

With the entire data file in RAM errors can kill you fast.

SLC SSD would be THE way to go.

As others have said 750GB sounds like a large db for QB. This could probably be compacted/optimized as well.
 
i coulda swore every version in the past 3-4 years used a sql client server database - not sql server per se but an equivalent.

Even if it is not sql server i'd look for help on compacting, fill, reindexing,optimizing. making sure they didn't turn on compression on folders etc.

most sql servers use a LOG file which is committed immediately sequentially - then the database writes the data back to the main database files - mysql even does this. in event of a crash the system can play back the logfile to present a pretty decent crash consistent state.

if the machine is not paging (naught on the db drive) - a defrag perhaps might help? the hard drive assuming its 7200rpm probably can write fast/faster than a x25-m but latency (fragmentation) will murder you. You still need to defrag the actual ntfs volume preferably when the database if off line 🙂

so tell us what version and year you have - or the filename/extensions of the data base files and we might be able to point you to help.

not quite sure i understand why someone with so must data to risk would go cheap - it's your business at stake. (or theirs).

anyhoo post up more data, free ram, paging , memory footprint. you do have antivirus disabled on the database directory? something seems just wrong here.
 
750meg QB database? Seriously? Buy the god damn X-25E. They can afford it with 150k transactions. And if not find a new employer. Stop working for pylons that won't take the advice of their IT personnel. Small or big the business deserves to burn if they won't take their IT advice.
 
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