22-25 April 2026 
SQLBits 2010
Designing High Scale OLTP systems
My Name is Thomas Keyser and I work for Microsoft in the SQLCAT team. I hold the land speed record for data loading in SQL Server. This talk focuses on lessons learned when using high end hardware and stressing it.
With the combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 it has now become possible to run SQL Server on up to 256 Cores. Recently, the SQL CAT team had a customer in the lab to test a banking application at high scale-up. Previously, we had test runs for the same application on 32-cores – but now the time had come to stress the app to 128 Cores.
In this session, I will talk about the lessons we learned from stress testing an OLTP workload at this scale. You will see some interesting bottlenecks and get an idea of what sort of numbers are achievable on a big SQL Server box. Of course, I will also provide you with the guidance on how to get those numbers.
Speakers
Thomas Kejser's previous sessions
BigData vs. Data Warehousing
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Finding the Limits
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Designing and Tuning high speed data loading
My Name is Thomas Keyser and I work for Microsoft in the SQLCAT team. I hold the land speed record for data loading in SQL Server so come here my talk on the options you have.
Designing High Scale OLTP systems
My Name is Thomas Keyser and I work for Microsoft in the SQLCAT team. I hold the land speed record for data loading in SQL Server. This talk focuses on lessons learned when using high end hardware and stressing it.