Re: Max Size Datafile in 10g

Mark Townsend wrote:

> Joel Garry wrote:
>> "Howard J. Rogers" <hjr_at_dizwell.com> wrote in message
>> news:<4146fc78$0$5727$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au>...
>>
>>>I was pretty certain 8 Exabytes was the total per-tablespace limit, but I
>>>was just wondering...
>>>
>>>If I thought for a minute that anybody on the face of the planet, apart
>>>from the CIA, actually *needed* 8 Exabytes, I'd care enough to look it
>>>up...

> Two potential areas that I know of (at least, we cite them as the reason
> we lifted the restrictions in 10g) that may cause data explosions in the
> next 5 years
>
> Life sciences (storage of 'individualized' genetic code maps ?) and CERN
> (the new linear accelerator and the hunt for the God particle)

Really?

Let me do some maths for a second (warning! warning!).

The human genome is about 3,000,000,000 bases long. Each base is just a single (English) letter, so can be represented in 1 byte. A human genome would thus require 375,000,000 bytes of storage, which is about 375MB.

For the approximately 6 billion people on the planet, you would therefore need 375MB*6,000,000,000 = 2,250,000,000,000MB, which is 2,250,000,000GB, 2,250,000TB, 2,250 Petabytes or 2.25 Exabytes.

So you could comfortably fit an individualised genetic code map for every person on the face of the Earth in less than one third of a single bigfile tablespace in a single database.

Were Oracle corporation anticipating some sort of population explosion in the next five years, or something?!

Mathematical joking aside, it's an interesting idea: two totally off-the-planet requirements dictating the internal workings of a mass-produced RDBMS. I dare say it doesn't happen very often.

You *sure* it wasn't just so the marketing department could say theirs was bigger than IBM's??!

</irony>

Regards
HJR Received on Tue Sep 14 2004 - 22:21:37 CDT