If you’re reading consumer SSD reviews and using them to estimate SSD performance under database workloads, you’d better stop. Databases are not your typical consumer applications and they do not use IO in the same way.

Let’s look, for example, at this excellent AnandTech review of Samsung 960 Pro –  a consumer NVMe device that I happen to have in my test lab.

The summary table is actually great, showing the performance both at Queue Depth 1 (single threaded) as well as Queue Depth 32 – a pretty heavy concurrent load.

Even at QD1 we see 50K (4K) writes per second, which should be enough for pretty serious database workloads.

In reality, though, you might be in for some disappointing surprises. While “normal” buffered IO is indeed quite fast, this drive really hates fsync() calls, with a single thread …

This blog post was inspired by my visit at the annual Zabbix Conference in Riga, Latvia this year, where I gave a couple of talks on MySQL and beyond.

It was a two day single-track event with some 200 participants, a number of interesting talks on Zabbix (and related technologies) and really well-organized evening activities. I was amazed how well organized the event was and hope to be invited to speak there next year as well.   (Just in case you’re not sure what Zabbix is, it is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks and applications)

I must secretly confess, it was also the first conference …