The Boston Marathon uses SQL Server - I wish I was quick enough to stress it!

Last week I competed in the 112th running of the Boston Marathon along with around 25,000 other runners on a beautiful sunny day in New England. It was a great experience; I didn't break any records but I was very pleased to complete the course.

Most runners have to qualify but I received a waiver since I was running for charity, for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Put it this way - I took full advantage of my waiver! With 550 runners in our team, we raised around $4.6 million to help fund innovative cancer research.

With friends and family watching, one feature that is very popular is the "Athlete Alert" on the www.bostonmarathon.com web site, which allows you to track a runner's progress in real time. Each runner wears a radio frequency "chip" on their shoelaces which transmits location information at every 5 kilometer "split" so that online users can track progress over the web. In addition, you can register up to 3 wireless devices to receive updates at 10k intervals. (I must admit, I have heard differing stories from "quick" to "never got it" depending on the wireless carrier). When it works, this is very cool technology, and you will be happy to know that the database is hosted by Microsoft SQL Server running on HP ProLiant Servers in a Failover Cluster for high-availability. (These servers each have 8GB RAM and 8-way Dual-core 2.8GHz CPUs). Apparently, during the hours of 9:30am and 5:30pm on race day, there are over 3,170,000 database queries submitted with the peak database CPU usage at around 3:15pm, the very time I finished.

So you could say that my sneakers crossing the finish line had the Boston Marathon SQL Server database stretched to its very limit. And apparently, it didn't skip a beat.

Cheers
Brian

HP technical case study:

http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA0-9567ENW.pdf