Fusion-io has added atomic writes, eliminating the problem of partial writes and the need to use technologies such as the double-write buffer in MySQL, writes Wikibon CTO David Floyer in  “The Road to Flash-aware and Flash Optimized Applications“. It has also donated a flash-aware demand paging extension to allow flash as a target for demand paging and an NVMKV interface to the Open Source community. This latter supports key-value stores as schema-less data structures used in NoSQL databases popular in hyperscale computing.

The result is a huge increase in performance of MySQL and other databases, particularly when hybrid or all-flash arrays are integrated with flash on the server, ensuring that database performance will keep pace with the advances in processing power.

All of this is a major step forward toward flash-aware applications that will take full advantage of flash performance. The T10 Technical Committee on SCSI storage interfaces and the SNIA group have both included atomic writes in their proposed new standards, so ISVs can have confidence that their flash-aware applications will run across different hardware brands and models. The result will be a huge increase in baseline performance that will guaranteed that these applications exceed quality-of-service guarantees consistently.

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