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Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM business software is designed to help enterprise organizations achieve a 360-degree view of their customers across marketing, sales, and service. Engineered to deliver performance that meets the needs of the largest global deployments, Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been tested for user scalability, data scalability, and network performance. This white paper focuses on database scalability. Microsoft Corporation conducted scalability testing to evaluate the performance of a single instance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 in a very large database scenario. The results of these tests demonstrated that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is capable of achieving sub-second response times running user transactions against a database of over 1 billion records. These tests were performed for a Microsoft customer whose service representatives require rapid access to records in a very large customer database. The test database was designed based on the customer’s production data and the database server received only basic tuning for the test. Microsoft Dynamics CRM exceeded performance goals for this test, ultimately enabling the customer to reduce their final hardware requirements for the deployed solution.
Microsoft undertook a performance and scalability study to demonstrate the performance capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM running in a simulated high volume call center. The test scenario included 1,500 users generating a data load of 5 transactions per user per minute against a database with over 1 billion records and containing more than 1 TB of data. The test environment was comprised of 2 application servers and a single database server. Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite development system was used as the test harness, and test cases were created based on the customer’s environment. The database was designed based on the customer’s own production enterprise call center database. Half of the user load was comprised of new users with caching enabled. A step load was used to create a user load pattern starting at 100 initial users and increasing by 10 users every 10 seconds until it reached 1,500 users. Once all 1,500 concurrent users were loaded, the test was run for 30 minutes.
In this test, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 scaled to meet the test requirements with sub-second response times, demonstrating its ability to meet the needs of enterprises with large data volume requirements.
The test scenarios were designed to accurately simulate an enterprise-level customer service organization. In this test, simulated users performed complex business transactions against three entities which typically see heavy use in enterprise call centers: Contacts, Contracts (with contract lines), and Customer Address. Each business transaction simulated an end user performing an end-to-end business process involving multiple interactions between the user and the system. Each business transaction includes an average of three read actions and two write actions, with a mix of new and updated contacts and contracts, and using Quick Find functionality to locate records in the system.
The generally available version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 was used in all testing without customization to simulate an out-of-the-box deployment. The database server received only the most basic level of optimization according to common best practices. Seven non-clustered indexes were created, three for contact and four for contract, to improve page load performance. One clustered index was moved to a different disk partition to improve disk I/O following Microsoft SQL Server best practices for managing large indexes. For more information on tuning and optimizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM, see the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Tuning and Optimization white paper.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 demonstrated its ability to scale to support the needs of an enterprise organization with a very large customer service database. In a test based on a customer database of over 1 billion records, Microsoft Dynamics CRM was able to achieve sub-second response times using a modest hardware configuration. The deep integration with key Microsoft business applications and components helps companies realize cost benefits by allowing them to take advantage of existing investments in technology, infrastructure, and resources to maintain and optimize the application. The flexible application architecture offers companies choices, including the deployment model that meets their needs and the user interface that is best for them.
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