The Real Cost of Enterprise Database Software

Storage for DBAs: The strange thing about enterprise databases is that the people who design, manage and support them are often disassociated from the people who pay the bills. In fact, that's not unusual in enterprise IT, particularly in larger organisations where purchasing departments are often at opposite ends of the org chart to operations … Continue reading The Real Cost of Enterprise Database Software →

Storage Myths: Put Oracle Redo on SSD

Storage for DBAs: "My database is slow"... "Well then why not put your redo logs on SSDs?" Gaaaah. I still hear people having this discussion and it drives me mad. "Nobody got fired for putting Oracle redo on ...<flash vendor>". Yeah right, but does that mean it was worth the investment? I'm bored of this … Continue reading Storage Myths: Put Oracle Redo on SSD →

Storage Myths: IOPS Matter

Storage for DBAs: Having now spent over a year in the storage industry, I've decided it's time to call out an industry-wide obsession that I previously wasn't aware of: everyone in storage is obsessed with IOPS (the performance metric I/O Operations Per Second). Take a minute to perform a web search for "flash iops" and … Continue reading Storage Myths: IOPS Matter →

SLOB2: Testing The Effect Of Oracle Blocksize

I recently posted a test harness for generating physical I/O using the new version of SLOB (the Silly Little Oracle Benchmark) known as SLOBv2. This test harness can be used for driving varying workloads and then processing the results for use in ... well, wherever really. Some friends of mine are getting very adept with … Continue reading SLOB2: Testing The Effect Of Oracle Blocksize →

The Most Important Thing You Need To Know About Flash

NAND flash memory chip on a circuit board – the consumer-driven technology at the heart of enterprise storage

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?"

Does My Database Need Flash?

A parody of the Cillit Bang ad slogan reading "Flash and the disk is gone", the featured image for the Storage for DBAs post on flash storage

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

Plates of sushi on a kaiten conveyor belt, used as an analogy for the rotational latency and seek time of spinning disk storage

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.

Database Workload Theory

In the scientific world, theoretical physicists postulate theories and ideas, for example the Higgs Boson. After this, experimental physicists design and implement experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider, to prove or disprove these theories. In this post I'm going to try and do the same thing with databases, except on a smaller budget, with less … Continue reading Database Workload Theory →

Flash Enables Human-Time Analytics

Analytics. Apparently it's "the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data". Allegedly it's the "Next Holy Grail". By definition it's "the science of logical analysis". But what is it really? We know that it is considered a type of Business Intelligence. We know that when applied to massive volumes of information it is often described … Continue reading Flash Enables Human-Time Analytics →