Given that we started to have enough understanding on the internal dynamics of ZFS, I figured it was time to tackle the next hurdle : running a database management system (DBMS). Now I know very little myself about DBMS, so I teamed up with people that have tons of experience with it, my Colleagues from Performance Engineering (PAE), Neelakanth (Neel) Nagdir and Sriram Gummuluru getting occasional words of wisdom from Jim Mauro as well.

Note that UFS (with DIO) has been heavily tuned over the years to provide very good support for DBMS. We are just beginning to explore the tweaks and tunings necessary to achieve comparable performance from ZFS in this specialized domain.

We knew that running a DBMS would be a challenge since, a database tickles filesystems in ways that are quite different from other types of loads. We had 2 goals. Primarily, we needed to understand how ZFS performs in a DB environment and in what specific area it needs to improve. Secondly, we figured that whatever would come out of the work, could be used as blog-material, as well as best practice recommendations. You're reading the blog material now; also watch this space for Best Practise updates.