[cronix]

One of the biggest "steps" I experienced was when SSD'd first came around. Suddenly "slow db queries" ran at light speed instead of taking 5+ seconds. It was quite physically noticeable and now it's not. You have to run EXPLAIN on everything to be sure.

Going back a bit further, I fondly remember my dad yelling "did you PARK the hard disk?" whenever he heard me power down the old TRS80 with "state of the art" 5 meg HD physically bigger than my first PC (which had a 40meg HD - dad was jealous). If you didn't manually issue a park command, the read/write head could flop around and cause damage if you bumped or moved the HD.

[sgarland]

Don’t worry, queries can still be written to bring a 96 core Xeon with 1 TB of RAM to its knees.

I’ve had to calculate maximum possible data transfer rates for RAM to convince devs that their query was the issue.

“This has an index, it should be fast!”

“OK, but you’re hitting 800 GB of pages…”