Following up on yesterday’s conversation about SSD vs. RAM speeds, I was able to dig out an interesting post on how Teradata’s CTO Todd Walter sees new developments in the storage space revolutionize the DWH space: Teradata Terrorizes the Data Warehouse. The interesting twist is that Teradata will transparently rebalance hot and cold data over the same disks, effectively allowing the use of disk space that would otherwise have to remain empty to guarantee top performance. SSDs are still in the picture, for very hot spots.
Now, to be honest, that sounds a lot like what we could do with Oracle ASM e.g. on Thor, except that ASM still requires us to manually partition the disks and explicitely put objects into its corresponding hot or cold ASM disk group. So a lot of the Teradata story really depends on how automatically they can do it, and how fast others, such as Oracle ASM, will catch up for the automagic part.