Gavin Payne
Gavin Payne is a specialist at helping businesses of all sizes grow faster by evolving their analytics, data and cloud capabilities.
SQLBits 2012
The NUMA internals of SQL Server 2012
This session reviews the purpose of NUMA, how it changes the internal behaviours of Windows and SQL Server 2012 and NUMA related performance monitoring.
Most servers we deploy today use a NUMA rather than an SMP mainboard architecture and while we might conceptually understand what that means we often don’t appreciate the subtle changes to how Windows and SQLOS work when they run on a NUMA architecture server. To make things even more interesting, we can deploy Soft-NUMA ourselves to request some of the behaviour changes ourselves.
This session will cover:
- what is NUMA and why it exists,
- how Windows responds to NUMA hardware
- how SQL Server 2012 changes its behaviour in the NUMA world.
We’ll then look at some of the benefits NUMA brings us and how we sometimes need to adapt our monitoring for the NUMA world.