If accelerating on-line transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehouse performance holds any interest, then take a look at Sun Technical Staffer Cherry Shu's article on using the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array with IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. A Sun Blueprints article authored by Shu explains how the combination of flash and disk technology can be applied to overcome disk latency bottlenecks that impede performance for applications such as the DB2 database.

As Shu explains it, flash memory devices are purely electronic devices that contain no moving parts. Therefore, flash devices can provide uniform random access speed. The time to access data in a flash device is almost linearly proportional to the amount of data, irrespective of the data’s physical location.

The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array is a solid state storage solution that is a serial-attached SCSI (SAS) device based on serial ATA (SATA) flash devices called Sun Flash Modules. The array provides low latency, delivers fast access to critical data, and enhances the responsiveness of database applications.

In this article, Shu illustrates how to increase OLTP and data warehouse performance via a testing environment consisting of a Sun Fire X4275 server and with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 processors and 72 GB of RAM configured with Solaris 10 to host the DB2 server.

An entire chapter is devoted to tuning for OLTP performance. To do this, Shu provides the code for tweaking the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, TCP/IP, the inter process communication (IPC) settings, and the scheduling class.

"Storing database transaction logs, indexes, and temporary table spaces on the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array can improve performance," Shu writes, "by reducing the application response time and increasing I/O throughput."

More Information

Increasing Performance of IBM DB2 Database with Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array - login or registration required.

Accelerate Databases with the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array

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