Playing The Data Reduction Lottery

Cluttered office desk with scattered papers, notebooks, stationery and a used coffee cup, centred around a brightly coloured lottery ticket reading “WIN MILLIONS” and “Jackpot Could Be Worth Millions,” sharply in focus under warm lighting

Flash vendors routinely quote “effective capacity” figures based on optimistic data reduction assumptions – understanding what those numbers really mean is essential before signing a purchase order.

Storage Myths: Storage Compression Has No Downside

Compacted red junk car crushed into a dense cuboid block on a wooden pallet inside an industrial warehouse, with twisted metal, exposed wheel sections, and visible headlight fragments

Storage-level compression trades capacity for CPU cycles and read latency – understanding that trade-off matters more than the headline reduction ratios vendors put in their datasheets.

Storage Myths: Dedupe for Databases

Row of identical yellow rubber ducks, illustrating the concept of data deduplication

Data deduplication promises capacity savings, but databases are one of the worst use cases for it – the technology’s assumptions break down against the entropy and I/O patterns of database workloads.

Storage Myths: Put Oracle Redo on SSD

Close-up of a tortoise, symbolising the slow write performance of SSDs for Oracle redo logs

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

Person shouting the word IOPS, illustrating the storage industry's obsession with the metric

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.