Benchmarking UIDs as clustered primary keys

Using Unique Identifiers (UIDs) as primary keys, especially as surrogates in data warehousing comes with many benefits. There are also performance impacts which are well known to be detrimental – but how much so?  Does it matter?  I set out to find out the performance impact and design drawbacks to UIDs as primary keys. Benefits vs. Drawbacks Some…

Hyper-V Cluster w/V-SAN for SQL Server

A virtualized playground providng parallel SQL 2005, 2008 R2, and 2012 instances (side by side) hosted on a three-node failover cluster. The experimentation possible with this lab is incredible – including any variant of always-on availbility groups interacting with failover cluster instances (which is a pretty interesting topic). Architecture Parallel Windows 2008R2 and Windows 2012 Clusters…