An advanced I/O architecture for supporting mixed workloads in an active data warehouse environment

Active data warehouse environments for advanced decision support demand extreme service levels in the area of performance delivery. An active data warehouse environment, however, has very different I/O patterns than a purely traditional data warehouse implementation. An active data warehouse must be designed to support a mixed workload consisting of tactical and strategic decision support queries with highly variable I/O patterns. In this paper we present a solution for increasing the performance of mixed workloads through use of cylinder reads and optimized block sizes. Tradeoffs in implementation strategies and performance implications are discussed along with future areas of research.