Production databases on SSDs?

[Dirk Koopman]

Ovid wrote:
> Does anyone here have any experience putting a production database on a solid-state drive?  Our database is heavily used and it sounds to me like we could get a massive performance boost for minimal cost and no architectural changes.  Are there any downsides I should be aware of?
> 

Write cycles. They are very limited.

Even on best kwalitee flash chips you will only get approx 100,000 write 
cycles. Most flash controllers "get over" this by doing "wear levelling" 
  (which means that writes are spread about the available blocks and not 
concentrated on the same few blocks [think inodes]). This will get you 
another couple of orders of magnitude. So maybe 10,000,000 write cycles.

Then there is the UDI file system. Which does some other optimisations, 
but is probably no (or not much) better than the wear leveling hardware.

Heavy usage? Don't think flash will help you, or at least - not for long.

Dirk