The start of March means I have been working at Violin Memory for exactly two years. This also corresponds to exactly two years of the flashdba blog, so I thought I'd take stock and look at what's happened since I embarked on my journey into the world of storage. Quite a lot, as it happens... … Continue reading Postcards from Storageland: Two Years Flash By
Tag: flash memory
Oracle AWR Reports: Understanding I/O Statistics
Oracle AWR reports contain multiple I/O sections that measure subtly different things – here's what each one actually captures and why conflating them leads to the wrong conclusions.
Oracle Exadata X4 (Part 2): The All Flash Database Machine?
With the X4's flash capacity changes examined, this post asks the harder question: is Oracle quietly turning Exadata into an all-flash array – and what would that mean for pricing?
Predictions for 2014: DataBase-as-a-Service
It's that time of year again where lots of people write articles which begin with the words "It's that time of year again..." and make endless references to crystal balls, tea leaves and the benefits of hindsight. But not me, I'm not descending into cliché. Apart from that first sentence, which with the benefit of … Continue reading Predictions for 2014: DataBase-as-a-Service
Oracle Exadata X4 (Part 1): Bigger Than It Looks?
The Exadata X4 announcement looked like a routine spec bump – but a closer reading of Oracle's positioning reveals something more significant about where the product is heading.
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.
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.
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