One of the common ways to classify database workloads is whether it is  “read intensive” or “write intensive”. In other words, whether the workload is dominated by reads or writes.

Why should you care? Because recognizing if the workload is read intensive or write intensive will impact your hardware choices, database configuration as well as what techniques you can apply for performance optimization and scalability.

This question looks trivial on the surface, but as you go deeper—complexity emerges. There are different “levels” of reads and writes for you to consider. You can also choose to look at event counts or at the time it takes to do operations. These can provide very different responses, especially as the cost difference between a single read and a single write can be an order of magnitude.

Let’s examine the TPC-C Benchmark from this point of view, or more specifically its …

The cost of SSDs has been dropping rapidly, and at the time of this writing, 2.5-drives have reached the 1TB capacity mark.  You can actually get inexpensive drives for as little as 60 cents per GB. Even inexpensive SSDs can perform tens of thousands of IOPs and come with 1.5M – 2M hous MTBF and a 5-year warranty: check out the Intel SC S3500 specs as an example. There is however one important factor you need to take into account when considering  SSDs as opposed to conventional hard drives – Write Endurance.

Many of us have heard about SSDs having limits in terms of how many writes SSDs can handle, many however assume this is what is already accounted for in the warranty period and so if the hard drives claim to have sequential write speed of 450MB/sec and a warranty of 5 years we expect …