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Perhaps you’ve heard this astonishing figure.  At Amazon.com, every 100 ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales. Sumeet Bansal, Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io, referenced the Amazon study as he separated myth from reality about Solid State Storage and its role in the modern Database enterprise system.  

Fusion-io is a producer of enterprise-class SSDs.  Their silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory applies flash memory to large-scale enterprise storage products like Storage Area Networks.

Sumeet’s presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on Tuesday included a variety of reasons why SQL Server  DBAs, as well as other technologists, should be excited about SSD’s.  He stressed that SSD’s are ready for the enterprise today.  His description of the things to look out for when purchasing SSD’s was quite useful – kind of like the Consumer Reports of SSD’s.

This list of differentiators is probably part of why Steve Wozniak joined Fusion-io as Chief Scientist – “the Woz” wouldn’t put his energies into anything but the most promising technologies.  And neither would Sumeet, who came over to Fusion-io from Wine.com, where he was VP of IT at the San Francisco company.

David Leston walked away happy, and probably stayed up very late installing his blazingly fast 320 GB Fusion-io Solid State Drive (SSD).  He won the coveted door prize, which was generously donated by Fusion-io. 

I hadn’t met David before tonight, but he was on the same wavelength as our speaker.  Sumeet’s discussion of SSD’s pointed out that you don’t purchase SSD’s based on cost per GB, but rather by the value of the performance gains and reliability. 

It was particularly interesting to hear comments from the audience about how Microsoft and other vendors will start optimizing performance based on SSD-equipped systems, in addition to conventional drives.  Right now there’s an assumption of significant latency when going to the drive.  As the operating systems see great reductions in latency, additional optimizations will add to the performance gains of this breakthrough technology.

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Christa Stelzmuller, Chief Data Architect at MySpace.com, spoke Wednesday night to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group about the MySpace Service Broker.  Last summer, Christa spoke to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group about the MySpace Data Architecture.  MySpace is an amazing example of what can be done with SQL Server.

Christa started her presentation with a description of Service Broker, and the challenges they faced creating it.  She then covered basic features, advanced features, and the major use cases.  She concluded with a roadmap of their continuing development plans, and some fun examples of how their developers have sometimes used Service Broker to solve their problems in somewhat misguided ways.

Keep an eye out on CodePlex, where her team will be posting their work.  We’ll get a chance to speak more with Christa in early November at the PASS Community Summit in Seattle.

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Ron Lichty spoke to SofTech recently.  His presentation, Making Your Software Development Hum, contained a lot of useful information for software professionals.  Since I manage DesignMind’s custom software development and database teams, I found this topic particularly interesting and valuable. 

Ron learned his trade at companies like Apple, Schwab, Berkeley Systems, and Avenue A/Razorfish.  He’s Co-chair of SDForum’s Emerging Technology and Software Development Best Practices Special Interest Group.  I’ve known Ron since the dot-com boom, and over the years have seen him leverage his large development community following to raise a lot of money for charity, an effort I’ve always admired.

Software development is difficult to be good at individually, and even harder to perfect as a team.  This is a discipline where you have to deliver something that works, and if you don’t, it’s obvious.  What’s not so obvious, though, is whether you got the job done as well as you could have.  It’s worthwhile to look over Ron’s slides and see his suggestions for making your software development efforts more productive and enjoyable.

If you missed Ron’s presentation to SofTech, he’ll be presenting to the East Bay Innovation Group on October 7, 2009.

You can learn more about SofTech’s upcoming meetings here.  SofTech is a San Francisco Bay Area business and technology networking group.

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