Bigger & Better

Data, data, data -- data everywhere, and some of us still cringe when our databases hit the gigabyte level. Check out this article on some of the biggest databases out there -- and not only are they big, but boy do they ever perform. Meet AT&T's 96 terabyte database that's compressed down to 26.3 terabytes -- it's a real-time transactional database for operational billing. The British Land Registry has a 20 terabyte DB2 database, running on z/OS that's growing by leaps and bounds -- at its peak, it was processing 702 transactions per second. Experian has an Oracle database running on 4 Sun boxes that handle at peak, 887 simultaneous queries -- and that peak can last up to 8 consecutive hours. Boeing has a 4 terabyte Oracle database that handles at peak, 281 transactions per second. The biggest of all however, is the US Defense Department -- they're building an Oracle database to house the medical records of personnel with a capacity of 50 petabytes, to be hosted on HP Superdome servers. Now that's big!