title: Can a 200GB or bigger SQL Server database load into a pagefile when not enough memory is available on the server?
body: <p>Here's what we're trying to do.</p>
  
  <p>We will have a 200GB+ SQL Server database that needs to load into memory. Microsoft best practice is to have enough physical memory available on the server and then load the entire database into that. That means we would need 256GB of memory on each of our SQL Servers. This would result is fast access to the database which is loaded to memory, but for the high cost of memory.  BTW, we're running SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008.</p>
  
  <p>Currently, our server is setup with only 12GB memory. Just under 3GB is allocated to the OS, and the remaining 9GB is used for SQL Server. Is it possible to increase the pagefile to 256GB and set it up on an SSD drive? What we want to do then is, load the database into the pagefile located on the SSD. We're hoping the performance will be similar to loading the entire database into memory, since it'll be on an SSD.</p>
  
  <p>Will this work? Is there another alternative we're overlooking? We want to keep the costs down as much as we can, without sacrificing the performance of our environment. Any advice would be appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>