That's silly. Anyone who does anything on their computer besides browsing the net and email will quickly observe that the move from slow to fast storage is the single greatest performance improvement in the history of the computer. It's very simple: if you are writing any non trivial amount of data or you are reading from datasets that exceed unreserved ram (a very typical thing to do that is gaming) then the hard drive is the primary performance bottleneck in the computer.

I could not disagree more. Disks spin and have some complicated assemblies and pricier raw materials. The main cost inputs to SSD are capital investments (which amortize to zero over time) and energy. There is a lower limit to density in flash (which AIUI we are already close to) but flash is already denser than hard drives. Tapes have an advantage in that they are not active and so are very cheap for offline data. Disk drives OTOH have no fundamental advantages over flash -- they are being rapidly displaced for user facing devices. Warm storage (NAS etc) where SSD performance don't play will take longer -- maybe 3-4 years and it's done.

moreover, storage is specializing. desktop/portable computing devices of all types are only going to be sold with SSD Real Soon Now (in many cases this has already happened). Hard drive storage is going to be primarily be used for dedicated storage appliances. This has already happened to a significant degree in the enterprise depending on how progressive the IT dept is.

Real world *write* IOPS for the better MLC drives are around 5000 (which is still about 20x what hard drives deliver)

poorly. here is a single S3700 outperforming 16 15k rpm drives: http://dba.stackexchange.com/q...

You can have both. Let's take transaction time performance for example -- bitcoin does not provide fast resolution (compared to, say, the visa network) but nothing is keeping a transaction broker from laying on top and providing those services. A 'bitcoin visa' payment service would then provide near instant times, allow for chargebacks, etc by absorbing the risk through fees and making a profit on the difference.

I mostly agree, but only because of the timestamp. Timestamps make poor keys for various reasons. A little trivia: that's my blog post :-).

now you get a faster computer that makes honey!

I used to say the same thing, but unfortunately it's not so clear cut. The intel drives which post such great random i/o numbers only do this because they are configured in write back cache mode w/volatile cache. The x25-M in write through mode can post about 50iops writing -- I'm not kidding. Also, wear&tear on the drive is much higher. IOW, the intel controller does not perform magic -- they cheated. The x25-e drive is configured the same way -- the performance drop for going to write-through is not so high (you can eek 1000ish iops out of a drive) but the drives are expensive and the the math doesn't work out all that well. The basic problem is that flash is plain and simply lousy at random writing just like hard drives. With a small NV cache on the drive, things could be completely different (and some boutique mfg IIRC already offer this) but until you see Intel, Seagate, or WD on a drive with NV guarantee for at least semi-reasonable price you will not see serious intrusion into the enterprise.

for the cases that you can't strictly do the query, we push the logic into a function call and dyna-sql it. (to hide the internals, it's actually mostly function calls over the low security interfaces). we also wrote a libpq wrapper to allow sending and receiving extremely complicated structures over libpq protocol efficiently. (here, if you're curious: http://libpqtypes.esilo.com/).

We use PostgreSQL. We expose the libpq not default port directly to the internet through pgbouncer. What we did:

*) Modify pgbouncer to only except extended protocol (parameterized) queries
*) Auto Generate list of allowed queries used by app to store in whitelist
*) Block all functions except auth if authenticated or to the whitelist othewise
have had zero problems. curious what you think.

Postgres has traditionally had lousy replication options. This of course is going to change with 9.0 hs/sr. Older versions of postgres (pre 8.x) had some operational difficulties that made it an awkward fit for high transaction load web environments. Now that those downsides are pretty much eliminated, it's about the best general purpose sql database out there -- it has many niceties/features that are rare/non-existent elsewhere. Transactional ddl for example.

11%...edging out ms sql server! Postgres 9.0 has built in replication -- it will be interesting to see how that affects its share of the open source db space.

It was nice of them to deallocate the cursor when done. Thanks!

I agree with most of what you said except for the comments on javascript. As a systems programmer you should understand that it is inefficient and silly to force the interface to refresh an entire page just to pull small pieces of data from the server and render them. There are many other wonderful things that javascript provides in terms of interface and user experience. Of course, I'd prefer a cleaner, more strongly typed language than what is probably the most informal language ever invented, but javascript is a big part of what makes the internet what it is today. applets and flash need to die though,