OLTP workloads will certainly be accelerated by SSDs. They tend to involve a lot of random reads/writes, and the former in particular are massively accelerated

OLTP workloads will certainly be accelerated by SSDs. They tend to involve a lot of random reads/writes, and the former in particular are massively accelerated by SSDs. The latter seem to be getting better as the technology matures. I think there is a question mark over SSD durability during very large quantities of random writes - they erase/rewrite a whole load of data for each small change, so those figures about the amount of data you can write to the disk before it fails might be approached unexpectedly rapidly. Anyway, basically, yes, SSDs are ideal for OLTP, and will likely be fast enough that you can cut back on denormalisation significantly. The trading of the features of traditional RDBMSs (ACID vs BASE, etc) is often an artifact of database distribution, however, and that won't change with the introduction of SSDs. OLTP databases that are small enough to fit on one of today's SSDs shouldn't really be a problem for a half-decent existing relational DBMS anyway. Stonebraker was actually involved in a paper that talks about OLTP in main memory, and I would commend that to you: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/vldb07hstore.pdf http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/vldb07hstore.pdf . Main memory has some similar-ish characteristics to SSDs (lowish latency, high transfer rate), so it might be of interest. Sorry if this post is a bit confused, just getting it in before I fall asleep ;).