OpenText Benchmark Trial for SQL Server 2012 Passes with Flying Colors

Knowledge management in complex utility organizations has become the sine qua non for continuing progress and profitability. Email communications contain so much information that they are ripe repositories for the expansion of knowledge – as well as the retention of records for compliance with regulations.  As such they have to be managed and retained for so many different types of workers across so many job functions that the mind boggles at the scale and intricacies for management.

Think of a utility employing 10,000 workers. How many emails or text messages does each produce daily in the conduct of their job? 10? 50? 100? Multiply that out 24/7/365 and you can envision an immense volume of data that daily operations are creating, just in email data. (BTW, how did utilities manage themselves before the internet?)

To be the responsible utility, each email might be managed, classified, recorded, managed for rights, archived and, potentially, be available for discovery for litigation or compliance review. Manually performing all these catalog functions is impossible, so the industry is looking for solutions that automate and ease the process.

That’s why we at Microsoft are pleased to announce that SQL Server 2012 has been proven up to the task for email-monitoring and records management for tens of millions of messages in short periods of time.

You can read the full press release here, but the summary is simple: In conjunction with our partner OpenText, we’ve verified that Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is up to the task ingesting 995,000 email messages in a single hour, or 14.8 million messages in a 24-hour period, and 171 messages a second. The latter is up to 15 times the typical ingestion volume and proves the capacity for growth, as well as up to the task of handling unusual events. You can see the results in more detail at this link.

Of course, SQL Server 2012 has proven to be a great data server through other tests associated with functions in the smart grid era. We’ve conducted two other benchmarking tests with partner Itron for  handling data from large scale meter runs. You can read about the last one here. We are proud to be a part of the continuing advance of the information technology infrastructure for the utility sector. – Jon  C. Arnold