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.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com