Doing dbt2 tests on on the intel drive today…  One of the strange things I ran into last time testing out my memoright drive was running the RPM version of the enterprise binaries -vs- the tarball version seemed significantly faster.  I had some other folks try it on other hardware and they could never replicate the performance slowdown,.  Basically before I was getting 4407 TPM in DBT2 from the RPM (5.0.60) in Centos 5, while the tarball (5.0.60) was only hitting 2505 TPM.   This was consistant.  Now I see that my most recent run of dbt2 against the Intel SSD acheived 3600 TPM/s, which is lower then the rpm, but higher then the tarball ( this was achieved via tarball ).   As i said this difference has not been verified independently, and it could be any number of odd factors at play on my hardware.

I need to go back and figure this out again…   But on a positve note, apples to apples the intel ssd …

Seeing my recent love affair with solid state drives I thought I would test drive one of the latest greatest drives out their the 80GB intel x-25m80GB.  Like a child on Christmas morning, I felt true excitement as the generic UPS envelop arrived on my porch today.

While it did not show up until late in the day, I can’t just let it sit their without starting to test it can I?

Benchmarks are running as I write this and I will provide the full breakdown of the drives performance as I finish up the tests.

But to wet your appetite, check this out:

50-50 read/write sysbench test:  1899 IO requests per second!!!  Thats huge!!!

Thats compare to the 284 IOPS I got on the memoright GT, a performance improvement of 6.6x, with a higher capacity 80GB -vs- 32GB, and a Lower cost $773 -vs- $680…  outstanding!!!

Here are the first unverified sysbench test runs:

I presented these at an internal MySQL professional services meeting about a month ago… its mostly a hodge podge of various benchmarks… but enjoy! The big difference in these benchmarks vs the other benchmarks is I am testing on the memoright GT drive, which is supposed to be one of the fastest SLC drives out their currently. Lets get right too it:

Looking at sysbench Random read/write iops:

So Yves knowing my affinity for all things solid state forwarded me this link, http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html , it seems Linus Torvalds picked up one of the new Intel SSD drives ( if anyone wants to send me one to test that would be cool ).  Whats interesting is he says the thing just rocks.  But how will this perfom in a database environment?  Not 100% sure, but I think it’s going to perform worse then the mtron or memoright drvies I have tested.  Why?  Well the drive is MLC not SLC.  Anandtech has a great review the Intel SSD, with an awesome explination with accompaning benchmarks on SLC -vs- MLC.  Most of these tests are performed in a windows environment, and I …

While Colin beat me in blogging about Project Kenai, I think I can still provide some additional background information about this new project hosting service from Sun.

If you are a maintainer of an Open Source project, you currently have plenty of choice when it comes to getting your project hosted for free. One criterion could be your software configuration management system (SCM) of choice.

Some of the hosting services that I am currently aware of and the choice of SCM they offer include:

• BitBucket ( …

Sometimes there are funny communication styles between people who are geographically distributed and working together all the time. Recently one of our team members echoed back to me some answers I gave over a chat session:

Q: Is it OK for me to buy quad-core servers? A: The old man walks slow but carries much, whilst [...]

I picked up what some claim is the fastest of the current SSD drives this week, the Memoright GT.  From articles around the net I have seen performance speeds substantially faster then the mtron drive I tested earlier…. so I took the plunge.  The first results?  luke warm.  The random performance ( databases like mysql are all about random performance )  of the drive is better in mixed read/write tests over the mtron, but the mtron blew it away in random read performance.  This are are my first pass tests, so I may have something wrong …  so take them with a grain of salt:

It's been a while since the last post. This is mostly due to me entering new territory in several ways. For one, I have been digging into JavaME development lately (platform change #1), building a mobile data entry and manipulation application that uses a an embedded database and talks to its server via Webservices, if connected. Otherwise data will be queued up locally and sent as soon as the

My name is Ravi Krishnamurthy - I am the Chief Software Architect here at Kickfire. I’ll be blogging about our thoughts on database technologies for data warehousing. More specifically I’ll be talking about current challenges, directions going forward, and the simplifications for wider market deployments and other ideas.

Data Warehouse (DW) queries are known to be more complex, more demanding, and longer running than OLTP queries. Some of the distinctive features of these DW queries that produce these characteristics are:

1) Table scan: Most OLTP queries are point queries updating or inserting a few transactional data. Most DW queries on the other hand are reporting or business intelligence (BI) queries which typically touch large numbers of rows of data, often computed by sequential table scans over the large data sets.

2) Many/complex joins: Multiple tables with many joins in the …

A couple more articles I saw posted out on the web on Sun’s new SSD offerings.  In the The official press release…  their are very scant details on the sun offerings right now.  But the official release says:

“Sun is already shipping Solaris ZFS software optimized for SSD technologies through the OpenSolaris(TM) community and is the first major systems vendor to add an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line to its portfolio, leapfrogging competitors and giving customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning disk offerings.”

Hopefully I am misreading this… 3X performance seems slower then the other SSD I have looked at.

In …