From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Mon Jul 12 1999 - 23:05:21 MDT
At 08:19 PM 7/12/99 -0400, dan <dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com> wrote:
[...stuff about big disk drives...]
>As a point of reference, Microsoft claims
>their 1-terabyte geological image database is the biggest commercial
>database in the world.
This was a marketing ploy and was so heavily qualified as to be a worthless
claim. In the commercial space, very large databases handle tens of
terabytes of online data (possibly more these days) and the very largest
data warehouses can run around a petabyte or larger. The fact that
multi-petabyte storage arrays exist indicates that somebody is probably
using them. Microsoft claimed their database was the largest on the web,
but as I recall, this was refuted by IBM who has multi-terabyte databases
(such as their patent database which at the time was supposed to be around
3-Tb) connected to the web.
Microsoft was trying to appeal to the PHB types who are easily impressed by
the word "terabyte". Only a fool would try to run a large online database
on a Microsoft OS, but I've seen numerous people try at places I've worked.
The results have always been less than impressive.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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