Here’s the problem I currently have.

We’re looking at deploying the Intel X-25M MLC SSD in production.

The problem being that this drive has a lower number of erase cycles but is much cheaper. Than the Intel X-25E SLC drive.

However, in our situation we’re write once, read many. I’m 99% certain that we will not burn out these drives. We write data to disk once and it is never written again.

The problem is that I can’t be 100% sure that this is the case. There is btree flushing, and binary log issues that I’m worried about…

What would be really nice is an API (SMART?) that I can enumerate the erase blocks on the drive, determine the max erase cycles, and read the current number of erase cycles.

This way, I can put an SSD into production, then determine the ETA to failure.

I …

Save the date - October 14th, 3pm Paris & Berlin, 2pm London, 4pm Jerusalem  -  for this free live webinar where you'll have a chance to ask questions to our experts.

This webinar focuses on how ZFS, SSDs and the Open Storage line of products from Sun are changing the rules in the database storage industry. You will learn how to increase data security, scalability, and reduce the price/performance ratio with these technologies. This webinar includes ZFS best practises for databases backup and performance.

To register, click here.

I had originally posted this on the 16th of September, but I had been changing hosting providers and such and it has managed to drop through the cracks.  So, if you didn’t see it before here it is..

I have long held the opinon that SSD (Solid State Disk) drives are going to be a major part of the database future. I just checked and I wrote a blog posting about them two years ago. I am not alone in this opinion.  It has long been realized that both I/O access speed and throughput increases have not kept pace with the increases in CPU power and the steadily decreasing cost of RAM. Storage space has increased, but both access speed and throughput performance have only had marginal increases in performance.

Solid state disks have long held the promise of lowered access speeds, especially when it comes to random access.  Even so, prices for SSD drives have been high and space small (compared to standard hard …

Just in case you missed the live event, we have a recording of the ZFS + SSD for databases webcast

Listen Now

You can also download the slides from Slide share. Download Slides

Over the last month I have been working on a ZFS Tuning for Databases presentation. I'll be presenting it live tomorrow 8/26/09 at 8 AM PST.

This based on a lot of work done at Sun as well as in the community. With the massive adoption of Solid State Devices (SSDs) (thank you iPOD) the storage market just got a whole lot more interesting. Incorporating SSDs into a ZFS pool is a breeze. This presentation is meant to help you get the best out of the ZFS + SSD combination for databases. We look into Postgres, MySQL and Oracle. I also provide a quick into into Sun's unified storage 7000 series systems.

If you are interested do Register Now

RethinkDB is all the rage today, as its a Y Combinator funded startup, which also launched a developer pre-alpha today. So what is RethinkDB you ask? Yet-another-MySQL-storage-engine, that’s what. But this time, its tuned for solid-state drives (SSDs), which also happen to be all the rage these days.

Anyway, check them out more, and the materials currently tell me that they’re using append-only algorithms, which allow for live schema changes and hot backups, with instantaneous recovery from power failure. Those are just some of the exciting bits.

What didn’t excite me so much was the fact that you were only getting 32-bit or 64-bit Linux binaries, built against MySQL 5.1.31 and you’ll just install it via the INSTALL …

I recently did a disk bound DBT-2 benchmarking on SSD/HDD (MySQL 5.4.0, InnoDB). Now I'm pretty confident that storing tables on SSD, redo/Binlog/SYSTEM-tablespace on HDD will be one of the best practices for the time being.

This post is a detailed benchmarking report.
(This post is very long and focusing on InnoDB only. If you are familiar with HDD/SSD/InnoDB architecture and understand what my blog title means, skipping section 1 (general theory) then reading from section 2 (benchmarking results) would be fine. )

1. General Theory of HDD, SSD and InnoDB

SSD is often called as a disruptive storage technology. Currently storage capacity is much smaller and unit price is much higher than HDD, but the situation is very rapidly changing. In the near future many people will use SSD instead of HDD.

From DBA's standpoint, you have a couple of choices for storage allocation.
- …

Scaling MySQL and ZFS on T5440

Solid State Disks : a 2009 fashion

This technology is not new : it originates in 1874 when a German physicist named Karl Braun (pictured above) discovered that he could rectify alternating current with a point-contact semiconductor. Three years later, he had built the first CRT oscilloscope and four years later, he had built the first prototype of a Cat's whisker diode, later optimized by G. Marconi and G. Pickard. In 1909, K. Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with G. Marconi.

The Cat's whisker diodes are considered the first solid …

Scaling MySQL and ZFS on T5440

Solid State Disks : a 2009 fashion

This technology is not new : it originates in 1874 when a German physicist named Karl Braun (pictured above) discovered that he could rectify alternating current with a point-contact semiconductor. Three years later, he had built the first CRT oscilloscope and four years later, he had built the first prototype of a Cat's whisker diode, later optimized by G. Marconi and G. Pickard. In 1909, K. Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with G. Marconi.

The Cat's whisker diodes are considered the first solid …

Scaling MySQL and ZFS on T5440

Solid State Disks : a 2009 fashion

This technology is not new : it originates in 1874 when a German physicist named Karl Braun (pictured above) discovered that he could rectify alternating current with a point-contact semiconductor. Three years later, he had built the first CRT oscilloscope and four years later, he had built the first prototype of a Cat's whisker diode, later optimized by G. Marconi and G. Pickard. In 1909, K. Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with G. Marconi.

The Cat's whisker diodes are considered the first solid …