BizTalk Server Database Optimization article

A few months ago, I tech reviewed a very well done article on BizTalk performance. It is called "BizTalk Server Database Optimization" and it is located here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb743398.aspx

John B. Brockmeyer did a great job with the article and I commend his attention to detail. I now reference this document often to my customers.

I had the honor of tech reviewing it prior to it being publish and I was amazed that they kept me in the credits as a contributor.

Regarding the article, John did an outstanding job with describing each of the settings, difficulty level of changing them, and likely benefits of changing then. Whenever I come across a performance bottleneck in one of these areas, this is the first article I bring up to see what changes we can make.

On the negative side, I disagree with how RAID5 is condemned. I agree that RAID5 is bad for disk write operations, but its actually very good at read operations and disk capacity. In a perfect world, you would have a separate RAID0+1 for each data file and log file of the 10+ BizTalk related databases, but that is impractical. My approach is to first see which disk is slow using (Avg Disk sec/read/write) look for disk latency of greater than 15ms, then I use the Microsoft Server Performance Advisor (SPA) or Process Monitor (SysInternals tool - now owned by Microsoft) to identify the files and processing causing the highest amount of I/O. Finally, I move the files causing the most write I/O to isolated RAID0+1 arrays.

Again, this article is a great achievement, so don't let my small details slow it down. Great job, John!