Editorials

SSD – Readers Respond

by Ben Taylor

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SSD – Readers Respond

I have loved the idea of SSDs ever since I first heard of them. Usually I have been able to get around needing one. Even on large databases with lots of updating and reading from the same tables you often find that a good amount of memory on the server suffices. This is more often true if you have a SAN for your disk storage.

With the cost coming down so much for SSDs it makes sense to consider putting some of your database components on them. Surely TempDB is a great candidate. For some databases it may make sense to put certain tables or indexes on the SSD if you can’t afford to put your whole database on an SSD. I went ahead and got a quote for the estimated purchase price of a 420gb SSD internal card (single server access only) and found it was around $18k.

There are tons of 2.5" SATA II SSDs available. Has anyone considered using those for DB performance improvement? How would you install it in a machine that is typically a server class computer?

Patrick tells us that these SSDs can be made to work like a SAN (theoretically). I can simply imagine the speed you can get with that kind of horsepower, and the ability to share it with more than a single server…now that’s cool. He writes…

I’ve been a proponent of SSD for many many years now. It took me nearly 4 years to get SSD into the production environment here and it took a new Computer Operations Mgr to help lead the quest through the budgeting approvals to get them into our SAN budgets. So we’re now finally getting ready to roll out a full production system in the coming months for our bloodline application. We’ve still got a lot of load testing to do, and this system is part of a multi-server redundancy based platform for failover, but the hope is there that my recommendations will have finally been realized as my experience says they will here. Whether or not it matters, we’re introducing SSDs to our EMC Cx4. This supposedly allows us to either assign a single LUN built on the SSDs and build logical drives on that array of SSDs or even allow the SAN software to monitor block level activity and “help us” by writing hot spot blocks to the SSD space allocated for that feature….all automatically. Yeah….I’ve heard claims like that before. I feel much more confident knowing that I decided (through judicious I/O and data file performance monitoring) which files belong on that SSD array. Good thing is that we’re able to allocate enough SSD space to run all of the production bloodline DB data files completely on the SSD. We toyed with placing the primary/secondary/TempDB logs on separate RAID1 pairs, but had enough space for now, so it’s all SSD!!!

Patric writes about another experience as well…

Years and years ago, at a former employer, we had a customer that complained (and rightly so) for months about the performance of our software when users were running daily reports. The eventual recommendation was to build up a server that had some attached SSDs (believe it was a Texas Memory RAM-SAN solution) and run just the database responsible for reporting on that small, but very fast SSD solution. Never heard from them again on that issue…..that sold me on the concept and benefits from that point on….but I never had to foot the bill, so I can understand the overall resistance. But if you need the speed…..you need the speed….and you’ll recoup those costs in your electric bill eventually J

Greg is interested. He is breaking people into the idea with SSD workstations. He writes…

I was just putting in an order to my boss for a couple this week – just workstation style, not for servers yet.

Haven’t seen much interest for them in the K-12 school district I work at.

But I’m hoping once people start seeing the speed change on workstations when using them, they may also start to carry over to servers.

I’d be interested in knowing if they’re good for use with transaction logs, and how that could affect performance.

If you have other experiences or ideas you’d like to share, send me a line at btaylor@sswug.org.

Cheers,

Ben

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Author: Ben TaylorBen is a Relational Database veteran starting in the early eighties on DEC Vax database systems such as Bloom and Harvest. He has specialized in SQL engines for more than two decades, with a primary focus on Microsoft SQL Server. Ben has worked with small and large databases for both OLAP and OLTP working on systems for many industries such as Medical (Medical Claims and Eligibility Warehouse, HMO Provider Management, Enrollment), Financial (credit card processing, mortgage, stock portfolio management), Manufacturing (Assembly Line and Product Assemblies), Sales, Auto Auctions and more.