July 29, 2004 at 6:38 pm
I am currently working on a project which involves multiple sites. The headoffice is the mainsite / call centre and has upto 40 users all accessing a SQL db (or at least they will be once we convert from Clarion). The 4 branch office have anywhere between 4 and 20 users requiring access to the same data as head office.
I have been thinking along the lines of a SQL Cluster at Head Office and leased lines to the Head Office for access. However thought I would take a step back and ask you guys if anyone has implemented anything similar. I got to thinking about Disaster Recovery and possibly replicating to the branch offices for DR purposes.
I'm not trying to get you top people to do my job but would appreciate any feedback whatsoever.
Cheers guys
July 30, 2004 at 4:00 am
I'd be very tempted to replicate out to the branches. the only issue here is that your liscencing costs will quite high.
what kind of quantity of data will be stored in your database, what kind of usage will you be expecting ? (i.e bandwidth, transactions per day etc)
what proportion of read/write will there be?
MVDBA
August 1, 2004 at 6:47 pm
Would we need an Enterprise licence or just a SE licence for each of the branches?
Not sure what size the DB will be once we convert, the DB is currently in Clarion and is nearly 2GB but the size in SQL after our first conversion attempt was 12GB.
We are able to obtain a 2mb pipe to each of the branches. Although we may only replicate to one of the branches.
August 1, 2004 at 10:40 pm
You only need SE for the branches. EE is required at the head office if you're going with a cluster. Keep in mind the cluster also require Windows 2000 Advanced Server or Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition for each node.
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
August 2, 2004 at 9:07 am
I'm not going to recommend anything, just want to mention the other possibility... We have a similar structure : central (about 60 users), 2 warehouses (10-20 users each) and 6 shops (2 users each). Our database was 25GB after the initial import, and is > 100GB after 2.5 years (almost no data deleted or moved to archives). Database is located on a server in the central and all "outside" users access the database via Terminal Server (leased lines in all branches, 128kb dedicated to TS use only - no internet, downloads or mails go through that).
In shops they do about 90% read/10% write and aren't much active; in warehouses there are lots of online activity including many insert/update operations, and also printing (which is the heaviest load on the line, since all the data need to be transferred - otherwise just the screen image and its changes). We are quite satisfied with the performance and nobody ever suggested, that we should change it... We just are about to upgrade the line to 256kb in one of the warehouses, which has much more online activity than the other and sometimes (especially when half of the people want to print something) experiences a bit slower response times.
cheers, Vladan
August 2, 2004 at 9:20 am
if you are thinking about this then you should realy look at Citrix Metaframes as well. you can run your application as a seamless published app. (or on a citrix desktop if you want)
this makes your SQL deployment as easy as the terminal server solution, but you get a far better (in my opinion only) thin client solution.
MVDBA
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