And speaking of SSDs, here’s how Oracle performs on an SSD

Andy Black is a former colleague and an Oracle DBA. Several times in the last few years, I ran into problems where I wished he wasn’t a former colleague, because my team got into some jams that I was pretty sure he could have fixed. (And let’s not even mention the time I got blackmailed into building an Oracle server.)

Last year, Andy did a thorough investigation of Oracle performance on SSDs, and observed very favorable results.

I can add nothing of value to Andy’s findings. Databases depend on fast, random I/O, which is something that SSDs do very well. The other way to achieve fast, random I/O is by throwing as many conventional disks at the problem as possible–back in the bad old days, if I had an unused drive sitting on a shelf and Andy had an empty slot in an Oracle server, he’d ask me for that disk no matter how old and slow it was. Flash memory is an order of magnitude faster than conventional disks though. The only way you’ll improve over SSDs is by putting your Oracle database in a ramdisk, if you can come up with enough memory slots, have a small enough database, and have adequate power backup.

But that’s the kind of radical thinking that used to get Andy and me in trouble.

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