Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > White Papers > Solution Insight: SQL Server 2022 Data Analytics on Dell PowerEdge with AMD EPYC 7473X Processors and Dell ECS > Relevant studies
The Dell solutions engineering team conducted additional tests and studies to understand the feasibility of reading hundreds of millions of records present on ECS object storage.
These studies involved joined relational data present in the SalesOrderDetail table in AdventureWorks database with around 121 thousand records along with external table ext.MachineOrders backed by Parquet files on ECS with 200 million records.
Figure 25 provides an example of joining the relational table and external table with millions of records that can return results within seconds.
In a separate test, the Dell solutions engineers used SQL Server as query and data hub only where all the data is external to SQL Server and present on ECS object storage. To do this, they joined two external tables backed by .csv file formats with one and five million records, respectively.
This new way of accessing semi-structured and unstructured data residing on object storage like Dell ECS storage, which is external to SQL Server. This access allows various use cases and new opportunities of performing ETL/ELT activities or offload ETL/ELT process altogether.