A World of Bytes

Curt Monash

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Some very, very, very large data warehouses

By CurtMonash on Tue, 05/12/09 - 12:18pm.

In the course of my research, I'm running across some VERY large data warehouses. Several of them, especially in the web log/network event area, are in the multi-petabyte range. Perhaps most surprisingly, they're run on a broad range of data management software -- not just Teradata, but also Greenplum, Hadoop/Hive (which isn't even a DBMS!), Greenplum, and others.

My current golly-gee-that's-really-big list goes something like this:

eBay has a 6 1/2 petabyte database running on Greenplum and a 2 1/2 petabyte enterprise data warehouse running on Teradata.
Facebook has a 2 1/2 petabyte datawarehouse runnin on Hadoop/Hive.
Wal-Mart, Bank of America, another financial services company, and Dell also have very large Teradata databases.
Yahoo’s web/network events database, running on proprietary software, sounded about 1/6th the size of eBay’s Greenplum system when it was described about a year ago.
Fox Interactive Media/MySpace has multi-hundred terabyte databases running on each of Greenplum and Aster Data nCluster.
TEOCO has 100s of terabytes running on DATAllegro.
To a probably lesser extent, the same is now also true of Dell.
Vertica has a couple of unnamed customers with databases in the 200 terabyte range.

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About A World of Bytes

Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.

Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.