Spinning disk hit its performance ceiling at 15k RPM over two decades ago – and physics, aerodynamics and economics mean it’s staying there. The consequences for latency are unavoidable.
Understanding Disk: Mechanical Limitations
Category: Storage
Storage is the foundation on which database performance is built. Latency, throughput, and consistency at this layer directly shape how systems behave under load.
While often abstracted away in modern architectures, storage characteristics continue to define the limits of what databases can achieve – especially as workloads become more demanding and less predictable.
Understanding Disk: Superpowers
Disk drives displaced tape by giving the read/write head the freedom to move – trading sequential dominance for random I/O capability. Understanding that physical design is where disk's performance story begins.
The Most Expensive CPUs You Own
The most expensive CPUs in your data centre aren't the ones doing the most work – they're the ones sitting idle waiting for storage. Here's why I/O latency is a hidden CPU tax.
OOW13: The Future Is Here (Just Don’t Mention “Legacy”)
Last week I attended Oracle OpenWorld 2013 in the stunning city of San Francisco, along with 60,000 other attendees. At times it felt like we'd taken over the entire city, with every street, bus, billboard and hotel plastered in Oracle logos and pictures of engineered systems... although apparently there was some other stuff going on … Continue reading OOW13: The Future Is Here (Just Don’t Mention “Legacy”)
The Real Cost of Oracle RAC
Oracle RAC is sold as a high-availability solution, but its real cost – in licenses, complexity and the hidden assumption that losing a node doesn’t count as an outage – is rarely made explicit.
The Real Cost of Enterprise Database Software
Oracle database licensing is eye-wateringly expensive per CPU core – and storage costs, often seen as prohibitive, represent a surprisingly small fraction of the total three-year spend.
Storage Myths: Put Oracle Redo on SSD
Putting Oracle redo logs on SSD is a common reflex response to slow databases – but it usually misdiagnoses the problem, and SSDs handle write-heavy sequential workloads worse than you might expect.
Storage Myths: IOPS Matter
IOPS figures dominate flash storage marketing, but for databases latency is the metric that matters – high IOPS at unpredictable latency deliver no real-world value.
SLOB2: Testing The Effect Of Oracle Blocksize
Using SLOB2 to measure how Oracle's database block size affects physical I/O performance – with results that challenge some common assumptions about blocksize tuning.
SLOB2: Essential for Every DBA Toolkit
SLOB2 – the Silly Little Oracle Benchmark – is the most reliable way to generate controlled physical I/O on Oracle. Here's why every DBA should have it and how to get started.
flashdba 