is full SQL needed for SIMS? How would I assess the workload on sql express

[chazzy2501]

I'm in a school with 100+ staff and 840+ pupils running sims with lesson monitor, FMS and Discover. I'm running all this on a 2008 server with 2008 express.

 

Now on the face of it looks bad limited to 1 cpu and a gig of RAM but looking at the performance counter the server is hardly doing anything. I'm looking in resource manager, I've filtered the sql services and looking at the 25 current clients they're pulling bytes of data. Even when I run a heavy report in SIMS the disk activity on the server is under 3% the network traffic is still in the Kilobytes. And all that for a few seconds then nothing. People tell me SIMS is slow and I have to buy full SQL if I want it faster... but (AND this is unfounded speculation) is it just bull? is this something capita say about sims to frighten people in to putting up with how slow sims is? spend £xxxx and it'll run faster (knowing schools are cheap and won't do it)

 

anyhow has anyone upgraded to full SQL and noticed night and day differences in performance? As I can't back my claims up.. And is there a better way to assess the SQL work load?

Edited February 6, 2015 by chazzy2501

[SHimmer45]

the recommendation for full from capita imo is so that they are covered if a school installs express but then exceeds the database size limitations / complain about poor performance if you have alot of people running large reports.

 

full SQL isnt that expensive and as 2012 is required for the next release id just install it

[localzuk]

The issue with Express is that it can't load the entire database into RAM - so you end up with all queries being sent to disk instead - which is orders of magnitude slower than getting the data from RAM.

 

With a school your size, your database will easily be over the 1GB limit of Express. The CPU limitation isn't such a huge issue though, as that only really causes an issue when you have people running big tasks like bulk CTF import or complex reports.

 

So, yes, full SQL Server could well speed things up - but as with anything YMMV. The yearly cost for SQL Server is quite low though under EES - especially when you look at the overall cost of SIMS and FMS.

 

Also, as @SHimmer45 says, SQL Server 2008 R2 is no longer supported from next release, so you need to get that upgraded to 2012 or 2014 asap.

[SHimmer45]

if you migrate your SQL i would recommend running the "house keeping" task capita suggest if you run into post upgrade performance issues which some school have suffered with.