Absolutely - SSDs make irrelevant a lot of the advantages that a denormalised storage model provides: denormalisation means fewer seeks but more data stored/rea

Absolutely - SSDs make irrelevant a lot of the advantages that a denormalised storage model provides: denormalisation means fewer seeks but more data stored/read, which is often a good tradeoff for disks, but not for SSDs. It should be noted that column-oriented architectures offer the ability to compress away a lot of the excess information (they're very friendly to RLE-based compression, for example, and vertica integrates awareness of the characteristics of that compression into the query optimiser). Fundamentally, though, in a data warehouse you're still going to be talking about pretty vast quantities of data, and disks are going to hold an advantage in price/performance for much longer than they will in the OLTP sector. I don't mean to suggest that the author has no idea what he's talking about, more that he's set up a bit of a straw man.