Solid State Drives, Trim and Oracle
I am having an interesting 'discussion' with my system administrator. He is worried that a database we have running in noarchivelog mode, if moved onto solid state hard drives, will one day start to slow down because of the problem SSDs have about not knowing which blocks can be written to. He is concerned especially that the Oracle Enterprise Linux kernel version does not support the TRIM command which lets an OS get around this problem (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM)
My counter-argument to him has been that Oracle doesn't delete anything: the datafiles, control files and online redo logs are created once and then simply have their contents changed, over and over. Nothing is ever deleted, so the no-TRIM limitation is not one we would ever run into. I concede that if we were generating archived redo, and then having rman do a 'delete input', there would be a genuine issue. But this particular database is not in archivelog mode so that doesn't apply.
Anyone care to comment on the logic of my case (or lack of it, of course!).