> In addition, most RMDBS are optimized for mechanical disks.
Since SSDs blow the hell out of platters no matter what the workload or access pattern is, you'll still get significantly improved performances, even without SSD-specific optimizations.
The one "optimization" I'd like to see out of SSD's rise is deoptimization: since access patterns becomes less important (or at least naive access patterns become less costly), I'd like to see systems simplified and "optimizations" removed rather than new optimizations added.
We (bu.mp) use a lot of SSDs at our datacenter.. we've probably used ~100 64GB x-25e, and recently we have added 20+ Micro P300 disks.
The first thing we used to do is try to convince the hardware raid controller not to do anything clever, like readahead etc, b/c seek times are practically meaningless. Despite our efforts at disabling every optimization we could control that was tailored for rotational platters, we still found that software raid (linux md) outperformed a classically great hardware controller--perhaps by virtue of being "stupider".
So that is our go-to configuration now: Micron P300 SLC, 200GB drives, with md raid.
Comments
> In addition, most RMDBS are optimized for mechanical disks.
Since SSDs blow the hell out of platters no matter what the workload or access pattern is, you'll still get significantly improved performances, even without SSD-specific optimizations.
The one "optimization" I'd like to see out of SSD's rise is deoptimization: since access patterns becomes less important (or at least naive access patterns become less costly), I'd like to see systems simplified and "optimizations" removed rather than new optimizations added.
We (bu.mp) use a lot of SSDs at our datacenter.. we've probably used ~100 64GB x-25e, and recently we have added 20+ Micro P300 disks.
The first thing we used to do is try to convince the hardware raid controller not to do anything clever, like readahead etc, b/c seek times are practically meaningless. Despite our efforts at disabling every optimization we could control that was tailored for rotational platters, we still found that software raid (linux md) outperformed a classically great hardware controller--perhaps by virtue of being "stupider".
So that is our go-to configuration now: Micron P300 SLC, 200GB drives, with md raid.