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I'm considering using Amazon's EC2 with a windows instance & SQL. I've seen some criticism of the perf of the SQL instances here. I'm wondering if any SOers have and first hand experience and can comment on the performance.
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Amazon EC2 supports a self-managed SQL Server database. That is, it gives you full control over the setup of the infrastructure and the database environment. Running the database on Amazon EC2 is very similar to running the database on your own server.
They use Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon EC2 instances to run 1000's of SQL databases, saving 75% on monthly backup costs and backing up 2 petabytes of data daily 30% faster.
With EC2, you can install any database engine and version you want. You are not limited by the version and configuration AWS supports in RDS (e.g., IBM DB2 is not supported by AWS RDS, but you can install DB2 on an EC2 instance and operate it). You have full access to the operating system and the database server.
Short description. There are many possible causes of this problem, including problems with an external service that your instance relies on, disk thrashing, or network connectivity issues. This article discusses one common cause: depleted I/O burst credits on the gp2 root volume.
I've just fired up a 32bit Server 2003 m1 small instance with SQL 2005 Express on and had a quick play. Was just using the supplied machine disk, not an attached volume. After reading the article linked to in your post I was expecting performance to be horrific. It wasn't great, but wasn't bad either.
My 'tests' were rather simple. Created a table with an identity column, a few text (varchar) colomns and a few more integer foreign key columns with relationships to some basic lookups.
It took about a minute to insert 1 million records, and about a second to make updates to 200,000 row blocks of data using Like '% to force a table scan.
This doesn't tell us anything about what performance will be like under heavy load.
Conclusion: Not great, but could be worse - especially given the manner in which 'disks' are stored on aws. I don't think this is really the place for a big SQL Server installation, lots of small installations might be a more insteresting prospect. I'd also be interested to see what performance was like with the db spead over lots of small attached volumes.
I'm hoping to use EC2 for an upcoming project and will be doing some more thorough testing over the next few weeks. - I'll post the results as they're available.
Looking forward to seeing what other peoples experiences have been..
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