Every time anyone mentions SSDs, I have a feeling of futility and being useless in near future. I have spent way too much time to work around limitations of rotational media, and understand the implications of whole vertical data stack on top.
The most interesting upcoming shift is not only the speed difference, but simply different cost balance between reads and writes. With modern RAID controllers and modern disks and modern filesystems reads are way more expensive operation from application perspective than writes.
Writes can be merged at application and OS level, buffered at I/O controller level, and even sped up by on-disk volatile cache (NCQ write reordering can give +30% faster random write performance).
Reads have none of that. Of course, there’re caches, but they don’t speed up actual read operations, they just help to avoid them. This leads to very disproportionate amount of caches needed for reads, compared to writes.
Simply, 32GB system with MySQL/InnoDB will be wasting 4GB on mutexes (argh!!..), few more gigs on data dictionary (arghhh #2), and everything else for read caching inside buffer pool. There may be some dirty pages and adaptive hash or insert buffer entries, but they are all there not because systems lack write output capacity, but simply because of braindead InnoDB page flushing policy.
Also, database write performance is mostly impacted not because of actual underlying write speed, but simply because every write has to read from multiple scattered places to actually find what needs to be changed.
This is where SSDs matter – they will have same satisfactory write performance (and fixes for InnoDB are out there ;-) – but the read performance will be satisfactory (uhm, much much better) too.
What this would mean for MySQL use:
- Buffer pool, key cache, read-ahead buffers – all gone (or drastically reduced).
- Data locality wouldn’t matter that much anymore either, covering indexes would provide just double performance, rather than up to 100x speed increase.
- Re-reading data may be cheaper, than including it in various temporary sorting and grouping structures
- RAIDs no longer needed (?), though RAM-backed write-behind caching would still be necessary
- Log-based storage designs like PBXT will make much more sense
- Complex data flushing logic like inside InnoDB’s will not be useful anymore (one can say, it is useless already ;-) – and straightforward methods such as in Maria are welcome again.
Probably the happiest camp out there are PostgreSQL people – data locality issues were plaguing their performance most, and it is strong side of InnoDB. On the other hand, MySQL has pluggable engine support, so it may be way easier to produce SSD versions for anything we have now, or just use new ones (hello, Maria!).
Still, there is quite some work to adapt to the new storage model, and judging by the fact how InnoDB works with modern rotational media, we will need some very strong push to adapt it for the new stuff.
You can sense the futility of any work done to optimize for rotation – all the “make reads fast” techniques will end up resolved at hardware layer, and the human isn’t needed anymore (nor all these servers with lots of memory and lots of spindles).
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domas mituzas 