What Would a SQL Server Experience Index Look Like?

The Windows Experience Index was a neat way to get a quick idea of how fast your hardware was relative to the rest of the world. It gauged the performance of your processor, memory, graphics card, and storage. You could see the weakest link in your rig, and then focus your upgrade money there.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was the non-geek consumer’s first chance to instantly compare desktops next to each other at stores and get a feel for whether they were hot or not.

Let’s build this for SQL Server.

We need to decide two things: what we’re going to measure, and how we’ll measure it. You can contribute ideas for either one, and then I’ll compile them into a spec document. Then we’ll set up a Github repository and a project so that anybody can contribute code. We’ll build it as a stored procedure to keep things as simple as possible.

Throw your ideas in the comments, and I’ll merge ’em into a file and publish it to the repository.