Inaugural Post: The Mission

The purpose of this blog is to facilitate the exchange of ideas between people regarding databases and how disk drives interact with them in a high performance, available, and scalable way.

While this mandate sounds very dry and technical... which it is... there really seems to be no central clearing house specifically around this area. There's plenty of information about databases and plenty around disk perf and SANs... very little intersects with practical daily application, and when you can find it... it's buried in a white paper on a vendor's website.

My basic approach is that everyone has a database and everyone has performance problems... and you can only go as fast as your slowest part... usually your disk. I'd like to cover the technical issues, tools, balanced system design and methodologies around isolating and resolving these issues.

In particular, my area of interest is around database/disk performance with large enterprise applications. For example, SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards.

This blog will hopefully help make matters clear as to how these all these parts work together.

Please let me know how I can make this blog work for you better.

Best-
Frank