Online Updates in Data Warehouses via SSDs

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Today's data warehouses operate on stale (day-old) snapshots of data, in order to achieve efficient data access. The rise of e-commerce and the need for 24x7 operations for global markets make online updates increasingly desirable. At Research@Intel Day 2010 last month, researchers from Intel Labs Pittsburgh demonstrated research exploiting Solid State Drives (SSDs) to enable fast data access on up-to-the-minute data. Researchers demonstrated a prototype data warehouse that caches recent updates in a SSD, and combines cached updates on-the-fly in query answers while preserving the queries' good sequential disk access patterns.
 
Thats great, and SSD will shine for this, but cost is still just too high vs space you get for most companies to be an option, it would cost probably about $8K US for me to buy SSD's for our backup server that i have now that can hold 3T of data.
 
DW's for large companies often measure in the terrabytes. Theres a diminishing return on investment with SSD's and absolute last minute data. Plus you have to get the data from the source systems into the DW, which means many links in a chain, which means it only takes one slow link to make it all moot.
 
I've been out of the SSD loop for a very long time, so forgive me if I'm wrong. Don't SSD's ahve a limited number of operations before the controller goes bad? I swear I can recall the early arguments about having like 1 billion writes before it ceases to function.

If that's true, isn't constantly updating, up-to-the-minute data writes going to burn through those drives?

Also, there is the issue with getting terrabytes worth of SSD space costing more than a space station.
 
When I started reading the quoted excerpts, I thought in this case, SSD stood for Stale Snapshots of Data. :-P
 
And RAMdisks would still be superior but but but... considering how fast SSD-style storage is increasing in capacity (and somewhat in speed but it still pales in comparison to real RAM and also the non-volatile nature comes in handy) that'll be the way to go for the future.

Hopefully someday we'll see Flash-RAM devices that can actually match raw RAM performance...
 
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