My MySQL Conference presentation on Tuesday discussed my practical findings on how Infobright's technology works in developing a MySQL-based data warehouse. I also touched on a more high-level question of how to select a technology for a different kinds of data-related problem areas, and this article expands on that discussion.
As pointed out by several other speakers at the conference, the balance of CPU, memory and storage has changed significantly in the last 10 years. Two important throughput factors on a per-thread basis have flattened out: CPU cycles per second are in fact dropping as power and cooling have become limiting factors, and the number of IO operations per device have only been increasing linearly, though Flash technologies have leaped on the latter front. However, two other factors are continuing to grow on …
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