tl;dr:
Make sure you flash an LSI-9211 to IT firmware rev#14 to get it to work 
with Linux and SSD trim.  You may have to downgrade from newer firmware
to older firmware to get the card to work.

Finding a SATA III controller with more than one PCI-e lane
After a recent hardware issue I decided to upgrade my computer to use new Intel 520 120MB SSD drives in RAID for improved performance.  The motherboard I use (an ASUS Rampage III extreme) has a Marvel SATA III controller with two ports, but I discovered that it is connected via only a single PCI-e lane (each lane can do at most 400MB/sec*).  This means that it can't effectively support even a single Intel 520 because one device can saturate the SATA III bus (An Intel 520 is rated at up to 550MB/sec sequential write).

So I went on a quest for a new SATA 3 controller.   To Frys! I exclaimed.  But unfortunately, all the PCI-e 2.x SATA III …

tl;dr:
Make sure you flash an LSI-9211 to IT firmware rev#14 to get it to work 
with Linux and SSD trim.  You may have to downgrade from newer firmware
to older firmware to get the card to work.

Finding a SATA III controller with more than one PCI-e lane
After a recent hardware issue I decided to upgrade my computer to use new Intel 520 120MB SSD drives in RAID for improved performance.  The motherboard I use (an ASUS Rampage III extreme) has a Marvel SATA III controller with two ports, but I discovered that it is connected via only a single PCI-e lane (each lane can do at most 400MB/sec*).  This means that it can't effectively support even a single Intel 520 because one device can saturate the SATA III bus (An Intel 520 is rated at up to 550MB/sec sequential write).

So I went on a quest for a new SATA 3 controller.   To Frys! I exclaimed.  But unfortunately, all the PCI-e 2.x SATA III …

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. My impression, which was confirmed by folks in the Oracle world, is that she knows her way around the Oracle optimizer.

These are my notes from the session, which include comparisons of how Oracle works (which Maria gave) and how MySQL works (which I researched to figure out the difference, which is why this blog post took a month after the conference to write). Note that I am not an expert on data warehousing in either Oracle or MySQL, so these are more concepts to think about than hard-and-fast advice. In some places, I still have questions, and I am happy to have folks comment and contribute what they know.

One interesting point brought up:
Maria quoted someone (she said the name but I did not grab it) from …