Serious database administrators have a strong historical bias toward using UNIX-like systems for their servers. The first examples here are using Windows instead because the graphs produced are easier to read, and therefore better for introducing the concepts of this section. But doing so reminded me why Windows is not the preferred database hosting OS for so many people.
Getting useful benchmark results requires the system to be quiescent: free of other programs running that would spoil the results of what is intended to be measured. When booting into Windows Vista to generate these results, I discovered the TrustedInstaller process was hogging a considerable amount of CPU and disk resources. It turned ...
