Dr. Codd Was Right: Color Me Sad

The Kleptocracy of Muskistan Devours You

The world is not linear.
-- Dr. McElhone/1974

[T]he massive push to relocate federal jobs outside the Beltway comes with the risk of kneecapping agencies through the loss of experienced workers and bogging them down in logistical minutia.
-- Curt Devine/2024 [that's the point: make the Damn Gummint incompetent, then destroy it because it's incompetent]

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]

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

I believe quite strongly that, if you think about the issue at the appropriate level of abstraction, you're inexorably led to the position that databases must be relational.

-- Chris Date/2009

This Week's thought

[Scotland's HPV] vaccination program began in 2008, and so far the women who were vaccinated as 12- or 13-year-olds have shown not one single case of cervical cancer. And the rate in women who were vaccinated at later ages was 80% lower than the unvaccinated. Cervical cancer is almost completely preventable through such vaccination programs, and the anti-vaccine activists who have come out against them (such as the dangerous fool nominated to be secretary of HHS) can go to hell.
-- Derek Lowe/2024 [the morons will be running the asylum, if we let them]

See you next week in a brand new show^{©Heckle and Jeckle}

Therefore:

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.

19 September 2009

Color Me Sad

Were I a real reporter, I might have been there for the announcement, but alas no. Turns out that FlashFire is not a SSD array. This is Larry (ComputerWorld is where I found this quote, for whatever reason not in their PR):

"We have a huge, fast flash cache built into our storage servers," Ellison said. "These are not flash disks -- make no mistake, these are not flash disks. This is a smart memory hierarchy made up of DRAM in our database servers and flash in our storage servers, with very sophisticated algorithms. This is a very smart memory hierarchy where the Oracle software manages that memory extremely efficiently, much faster than flash disk."

So, it seems that FlashFire is not a flash disk subsystem. Oh well.

Update:

I knew I had read that FlashFire was specific to SSD implementation; I know Professor, I should keep better notes. But Burleson is one of the veterans of SSD for databases; Oracle in his case. I'll be adding a few Good Stuff links, and his main site will be one of them. So, here's his take on FlashFire (which also conflicts with what Larry said).