Troubleshooting - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Administration - page 384

Implementing parallel query processing
methods
In recent times, the processing power of a hardware system has been increased. This helps
speed up the processing of large data and data warehouse queries, which can be termed
as parallelism. By default, SQL Server utilizes the power of a multi-core hardware platform
for a large amount of data management chores. Specifically, in query processing, the CPU is
used extensively to perform multiple threads simultaneously. CPU can be a logical process or
hyper-threaded cores. In this recipe, we will work on required tasks in implementing parallel
query processing methods that can enable database or application tuning to help improve the
performance.
Getting ready
In order to set up and get the advantage of parallel query processing methods, the hardware
plays an essential part. The minimum system requirements for parallel query processing is as
follows:
F Processor type with a recommended 2.0Ghz or faster:
Intel Xeon with Intel EMT64T support
Intel Pentium IV with EM64T support Pentium IV compatible
AMD Opteron 32-bit or 64-bit
AMD Athlon 64
F Operating system:
Windows Server 2008 SP2 64-bit
Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit
Windows on Windows (WOW mode)
F Memory:
Minimum 2 GB or higher
Operating system maximum
F SQL Server Edition:
SQL Server 2008 R2 DataCenter
SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard
SQL Server 2008 R2 Web or Workgroup