Re: ORACLE vs INFORMIX vs MS SQL SERVER

In article <71u5tm$m5q$1@news.xmission.com>, Billy Wheeler <billy@west.co.za> wrote: > >On 5 Nov 98, at 16:46, Art S. Kagel wrote: > [snip] > >> The data limit for a 32bit Informix IDS instance is 2TB of data total >> (1024 chunks @ 2GB each == 2TB). Only 64bit implementations overcome this >> by a) allowing chunks > 2GB and b) increasing pagesize to 4K which allows >> 2048 chunks. On 64bit the data is virtually unlimited. With 18GB drive as >> a single chunk 2048 chunks = 36TB and using RAID to create larger virtual >> drives the sky is the limit since the OS limits llseek() offsets to 1024GB >> for RAW devices that makes the actual hard limit 2048TB. (What is that >> called 2PetaBytes?) > >I think so... > You are correct, 1000 Terrabytes is a Petabyte. And just for reference 1000 Petabytes is a Hexabyte. In the entire history of NASA, they have generated a total of 1.5 hexabytes of information... and most of it is unusable since it is on flaking and brittle 7 track tape. If you do much large scale video work with databases, you will see moderately big metadata databases 100GB-1TB which manage huge inventories of video files. One company I have worked with manages about 17 PB of video files on some special StorageTek video storage units. A typical major video content producer like Sony, Turner, or BBC may have 100s of thousands of hours of video, and they want to put this on disk and manage it. Just for reference, a single video file for one hour of broadcast quality television, is typically around 4 GB in size. Now you see why DVD can hold 18GB of information (double sided). Albert -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Albert Landeck Sr. DataBlade Engineer Never assume malice when Informix DataBlade Engineering Group stupidity can explain a