NAND flash development is driven by the consumer market – not the enterprise. The question to ask any flash vendor isn't "how fast?" but "where's your innovation?"
The Most Important Thing You Need To Know About Flash
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.
Does My Database Need Flash?
Not every database benefits from flash storage – knowing when it matters requires understanding how much I/O your workload generates, how random it is and how much latency is already costing you.
Understanding I/O: Random vs Sequential
Disk I/O forces a choice between random and sequential access – and that choice defines whether latency compounds or disappears. Flash makes the distinction irrelevant.
The Fundamental Characteristics of Storage
Latency, IOPS and bandwidth are the three properties that define any storage system – understanding how they relate to each other is the first step to knowing what your database actually needs.
Performance: It’s All About Balance…
Database performance problems are rarely solved by faster CPUs alone – the real issue is imbalance between resources, and disk latency is the silent bottleneck that flash storage changes.
New Blog Series: Storage For DBAs
DBAs and storage people speak different languages – this series bridges the divide, translating storage concepts into terms that make sense from a database perspective.
Engineered Systems – An Alternative View
Everyone in enterprise IT is selling "engineered systems". Here's an independent assessment of what the term actually means and whether the integrated appliance model lives up to its promises.
Database Workload Theory
Before you can benchmark or optimise a database, you need a model of what a database workload actually is. Here's the theoretical foundation – and why it matters more than most DBAs realise.
Flash Enables Human-Time Analytics
Analytics has always been constrained by storage latency – queries that take hours are useless for real-time decisions. Flash collapses that latency and makes human-time analytics possible.
Why In-Memory Computing Needs Flash
Running everything in memory sounds like it makes storage irrelevant. It doesn't – flash is what enables in-memory architectures to reach their full potential, for three distinct reasons.
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