Sql Server distribution and configuration for best performance

I want design and implement an enterprise software with silverlight.I use sql server database for this.many useres run sql queireis on sql server database.开发者_StackOverflow how can i configure sql server database for best performance? how can i distribute sql server database for best performance? how can i distribute sql server database between some servers for best performance? and so what technologies can i use in sql server for best performance?

In addition to replication you can use mirroring or log shipping for this. Note that I am talking only about scaling out reads, not write. So reports etc. can be run from the copies of the database but writes must go to the main copy (unless you are using merge replication, which is frightening to me). There are some caveats of course.

With database mirroring, you can use the secondary as a read-only reporting source by taking a snapshot. There are limits here to how many databases you can mirror and there is of course maintenance to manage the snapshots. It is not quite true distribution of resources here, but it can be helpful to offload some of the load. In the next version of SQL Server (Denali), you will be able to set secondaries as read-only, so you can avoid the maintenance of snapshots.

With log shipping, you can essentially keep a stale version of the database around for reporting, and replace it periodically by restoring logs to it. You have a lot more flexibility here compared to replication or mirroring, as you can actually define a delay (like every 6 hours or once a day, you refresh the copy) - which can also serve as a "recover from a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot" scenario. The downside is that to restore a new copy of the database you need to kick all the current users out, as the database needs to be in single user mode in order to recover.

Those are just a couple of ideas for helping scale out reads, but deep down I agree with @gbn - are you solving a problem you don't have yet? It's one thing to design for scalability, but it's very easy to step over that line and completely over-engineer.

Well, SQL Server doesn't really have a load balancing mchanism in and off itself. What it does support, however, is an active/passive node configuration and also replication.

We are using the replication strategy in one application I support. You can read more about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms151198.aspx

In our configuration, we basically have a transactional database and a reporting database. We replicate the data from our transactional DB to the reporting DB. Any reporting is done against this reporting DB, so that we don't slow down work being done on the transactional DB due to some long running report.

Note that the replication isn't truly real time. In other words, there's some time involved in replicating the data from the transactional to the reporting DB, albeit a very small time amount. But replication is certainly one strategy you could consider if you are trying to balance workload.

Other things you might consider are partitioning large tables for better performance.

As gbn pointed out in his comment though, it's better to determine if you actually need these strategies before implementing them, because they add a lot of complexity and maintenance efforts, which may not even be needed. It's important to properly analyze how much data you think you will have, and how much activity will be occurring against that data to determine if strategies such as the ones I just described are even needed.

Also, you can refer to this link for some other helpful information and some links to whitepapers you may find helpful: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqldisasterrecovery/thread/05cf41b7-c558-44bf-86c6-12f5c2b2ffe2