Dr. Codd Was Right: Fusion-io Ups the Ante, Gauntlet Tossed

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.

25 November 2009

Fusion-io Ups the Ante, Gauntlet Tossed

Last week Fusion-io raised the bar considerably. While I don't normally quote much from sources, this time I can't resist:

Achieving a 1TB/s sustained bandwidth with existing state-of-the-art storage technologies requires close to 55,440 disk drives, 396 SAN controllers, 792 I/O servers and 132 racks of equipment. Fusion-io can achieve this same bandwidth with a mere 220 ioDrive Octal cards, housed in Infiniband-attached I/O servers running the Lustre parallel file system. This 1TB/s Fusion-io based solution requires only six racks or less than 1/20th the rack space of an equivalent, high-performance, hard disk drive-based storage system.

What's important about this quote is its specificity: .5% of the number of drives, and ancillary gear. The other important point is that Fusion-io adapted their PCIe cards to an external rack. The rackable folk (STEC in particular) won't have as easy a task of taking their drives to the slot. Whether the controller does the job of wear leveling and the like, only time will tell.

And then there's the air of mystery, "two presently undisclosed government organizations" are the buyers. Could it be CIA/NSA doing a real-time database??? Only The Shadow Knows.