This spring there has been extensive benchmarking done with the Itron team on Itron Enterprise Edition Meter Data Management and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, which I have been following. A few weeks ago there was a webcast with Itron's Robert Sonderegger and our own Lonnye Bower, describing the preliminary results. Preliminary public results tend to be conservative to avoid egg-on-the-face syndrome. Today I received the final report (June 6th, 2011) while eating a very spicy Mexican meal -- I am not sure which was hotter. You can read the report here.

A few new items that I spotted were:

  • The benchmark handled a system equivalent to 20 million utility meters with hourly reads. There are about a half-dozen utilities in the world of that magnitude.
  • The import goal was exceeded by 170%
  • The export goal was exceeded by 204% -- ouch! That is hot!
  • A 3:1 reduction over the largest competitor in licensing costs was estimated.

You should compare these results to those obtained on SQL Server 2005 reported here -- SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with IEE MDM v7.0 SP3 pushed the benchmark more than 3x higher! Congratulations to the engineers at Itron and Microsoft for a job well done!