I've been reading Cringely for decades, and especially, along with most who read him it turns out, his annual predictions. Since leaving his PBS gig, he hasn't been doing them. Sniff. But today he announced that he would do another, and invited his readers to contribute same. Well. Not one to turn my nose up at the possibility of 15 seconds of fame (he allowed that any reader predictions would be printed with attribution, which he sort of has to do) I offered up what follows.
Just one, sort of.
I've been banging a drum for SSD for a number of years, at least since Intel released their flash version (in true Enterprise, Texas Memory has been shipping DRAM parts for decades, but that's another story).
When STEC, Violin, et al started to build "Enterprise" flash SSD those few years ago, the notion they promoted was that SSD would replace HDD, byte for byte. That didn't happen, largely IMO because the storage vendors (SSD makers and storage OEMs) couldn't develop a value story.
There always was a story: the Truly Relational RDBMS (not the flatfile dumps common in Fortune X00 companies which moved their COBOL/VSAM apps to some database) is (so far) the only thing which exercises the real strength of the SSD: random IOPS. But to get that benefit, you have to have a BCNF (or better) database, and join the shit out of it. The COBOL/VSAM and java apps devs don't think that way; they love their bespoke written loops.
So, what we've got now is SSD as front end cache to HDD arrays. And SSD as game machine and laptop speed up. Enterprise hasn't yet bought SSD as primary storage. Hmmm.
In 2011, we will see that. My guess is Oracle will be the lead. It works this way. Larry wanted Sun, not for java or MySql, but the hardware stack. What Larry needs is that last group of holdouts: IBM mainframe apps. To do that, he needs a credible alternative to the z machine ecosystem.
He has that now, but it ain't COBOL. He needs a value story to get those COBOL/VSAM apps. Whether you buy that Oracle is the best RDBMS or not, Larry can make the case, particularly since his competitors (save IBM) have adopted the MVCC semantic of Oracle.
Pushing highly normalized databases, with most/all of the business logic in the database (DRI and triggers and SP) running on SSD makes for a compelling story. But you've got to spend some quality time building the story and a POC to go with it. Larry's going to do it; he hasn't any choice. And it makes sense, anyway.
Remember, a RDBMS running on SSD is just an RCH from running an in-memory database. You don't need, or want, lots of intermediate caching between the user screen and the persistent store. Larry's got the gonads to do it.
Regards,
Robert Young
Despite what the reactionaries assert, the world is not flat nor is it hierarchical. The world is relational. Infinite granularity yields infinite complexity.
Vaccinated ≠ Not Infectious
$536,800,000 MARF™(party like it's 1829)
-- New York Slammers, so far/2024 [GA and The Feds still to come]
-- New York Slammers, so far/2024 [GA and The Feds still to come]
Covid-19 has killed at least 1,123,836 people (as of 20 March 2023, final update)
Scientists aren't vocal enough about science. There are large groups of people who think scientists are all frauds and who don't
believe in science, and they're being cultured by some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders. -- Drew Weissman/2022
To date, Microsoft is stating that organizations testing In-Memory OLTP have
seen transaction speeds improve by up to 30 times compared to past
performance, with the best performance gains achieved when the business
logic resides in the database and not in the applications.
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]
I have had to explain and re-explain and re-explain and re-explain, you know, how relational databases work, what is an eigenvector,
what is dimensionality reduction.
-- Christopher Wylie/2018
... but Flash-based storage has such a different performance profile from rotating media, that I suspect that it will end up having
a large impact on filesystem design. Right now, most filesystems tend to be designed with the latencies of rotating media in mind.
-- Linus Torvalds/2007
-- Chris Date/2009
This week's thought
Investigative reporters are an idiosyncratic breed of journalist. Typically fearless, they are often a source of angina to their editors. Mr. Walsh was no exception. -- Michael S. Rosenwald/2024 [no surprise - I spent a bit of time on Jack Anderson's staff]
In a time of SSD, multi-core/processor, two terabyte memory and Optane App Direct Mode machines, there is no reason not to
build from BCNF data. Time to do what Dr. Codd demonstrated. Technology has finally caught up with the maths.
About
- Robert Young
- Been doing databases, both relational and others, as well as operations research since Hector was a Pup.
Shameless Plug
I know a little something about SQL, DB2 (preferably LUW, z/OS if the money's right), Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, and database design in general. Mentoring/teaching/consulting on a short term basis, too. And a bit of stat analysis if it's R.
gnuoytr at rcn dot com.
gnuoytr at rcn dot com.
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