"Domenico Discepola" <joeminga@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:7OPnb.97624$PD3.5193098@nnrp1.uunet.ca...
> Hello all. Before my arrival at my current employer, our consultants
> physically set up our MSSQL 7 server as follows:
> drive c: contains the mssql engine
> drive d: contains the transaction log
> drive e: contains the data files
>
> No filegroups were set up and the data files consist of only 1 large
> physical file. Currently, our data file is >10GB. When I was trained on
> the physical aspects of sqlserver, I was told to never create physical
files
> > 2048MB each. If I did, I could expect inefficient physical storage of
> data and slower performance (due to the OS).

I've never heard that, can anyone else comment?

Prior to SQL 7.0 there was some performance gain from multiple files since
there would be one (and only one) pointer moving within a file, so multiple
files would gain you performance with multiple file pointers. But I believe
that was resolved as of SQL 7.0

>
> Our server has 2 RAID-5 arrays. Drive c: and e: are located on the first
> array and drive d: on the second. We're running Windows 4.0 NT Server SP6
> with NTFS.
>
> Can someone comment on the use of 1 single large data file vs. more
smaller
> data files?

They did the biggest bang, which was putting their data files and logs on
separate physical devices (though I'd recommend RAID 1 or 1+0 for the logs).


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