ETLGuru

It is a normal trend in it to buy the most powerful machine for production usage. Example you production database box will have 16 CPUs your QA 8 and your Development box 4 or 6. Similar ratio is maintained on ETL servers, Application servers, and Hard Disk performance.

Logic being the production environment is critical for end user experience.
Agreed! That the response time is critical for end users; however that does not mean you buy slower machine for your development. Imagine the time wasted while a resource is sitting in front of the machine, waiting for the query to return with data. A developer usually spends all his time working in the development database. So imagine a development box slower by 50% then production. That means a developer is loosing 50% of his time waiting for his result. It’s not just about his time but also about his focus and concentration that he will loose because his experience is bad with the system. It will be not an exaggeration to say that he will loose 4 hours from an 8 hours day.

In US total cost on an ETL developer is about $100 an hour. So the company is loosing $400 per developer per day. You do the math for 5 to 10 developers working for 1 year.

I am not saying that Production and Development systems must be same, but I firmly believe the difference should be more in the reliability and availability of the servers rather then on the performance difference between the servers.

I thought of this article while waiting for a query to return from a development box. It took exactly half the time as the production server and I remembered that the management is already discussing of upgrading the development server to improve the performance.