Well, not necessarily. We went from 20MB HDs in the early '90s to 4GB RAM now, with not much change to most things.
Busses et al would be redesigned, sure, but contemporary databases, software, virtual memory techniques etc, not so much. You can just tune their "magic numbers" accordingly.
The thing is that architecturally nothing has really changed from 70's. And even if it did, Oracle cannot just go and tweak some "magic numbers" (what would those be?) since the idea of spinning plates at the end of a long and perilous pipeline is at the core of any contemporary DBMS. To change this you cant just assign a junior developer for a week or two to "optimize" for SSD.
It is an monumental effort requiring that you throw away and/or revisit every presumption you made in the last 30-40 years that it took to build these DBMS.
It is similar to introduction of internal combustion engine to the world of horse and carriage.
At first glance, just mount the engine on the carriage and voila! It turns out that carriage was fundamentally changed to accommodate the internal combustion engine. To the degree that besides four wheels, modern ICE powered carriage looks nothing like old horse powered carriage.
The thing is that architecturally nothing has really changed from 70's.
Which is my case exactly. Despite going from KB of main memory to TB, and from a few MB of hard disk to PB, "nothing has changed". What makes you think this case will be different?
And even if it did, Oracle cannot just go and tweak some "magic numbers" (what would those be?) since the idea of spinning plates at the end of a long and perilous pipeline is at the core of any contemporary DBMS.
I was talking about the OS level, not Oracle's. Tuning virtual memory and related pipelines.
And, no, the "idea of spinning plates" it's not "at the core" of DBs. Don't even know what you imply by this. That, for some reason, Oracle say wouldn't take advantage and run orders of magnitude faster on pure dynamic memory? Oracle --and all DBs-- already runs just fine on non spinning SSDs. And most DBs already have special tunings to keep the working set or even everything in the main memory, and never touch the disk. That the underlying storage is a spinning platter of some dynamic memory 100 or 1000 times faster will not matter much.
Is that really a possibility? I assumed the 6 Gb/sec (as Wikipedia claims) for SATA 3 would be sufficient bandwidth for any drive storage.
I'll admit, I've not followed this sort of hardware closely but my understanding was that SATA is set on its own track, apart from the other buses like PCI and USB.
There is an architecture revolution to be had, but it isn't as easy carving off a high speed bus from the CPU and turning your database speed up to a factor of 20.
If the write lifetime is a million writes, at 10ns/write you can burn that up in a millisecond.[1]
Maybe you trust your server hardware to last for three years.[2] You get about 38 writes per hour. I hope you aren't syncing a critical chunk of data once a minute.
So you have an insanely fast, nonvolatile store, but you can't just write to it willy-nilly. Let the engineering begin! (I'm sure it has for some people.)
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[1] Malware can be expensive in a hurry. A couple quick loops and you can ruin 1000 blocks/second.
[2] If you have less than a few dozen servers you end up playing quality roulette. You have no idea which models from which vendors are going to hold up, so you make a guess based on reputation and price. Sometimes you are right, sometimes you are wrong. Sometimes you have a 50% mortality in 6 months. When you get a model that works well, by the time you know it lasts, you can't buy it any more. My strategy was always to buy a batch, run them in non-critical positions for 6 months to screen for early failures, if they were good, move the critical functions to them, but then get off of them before the age related failures begin. Three years was about my limit.
Device controllers used to be divided between a northbridge (memory, video) and southbridge (pcie, sata, usb, etc), but in the latest generation northbridge components are integrated into the CPU.
