Briefs

eWeek (11/08/03); Hicks, Matt

For the first time in database consulting company Winter Corp.'s five surveys of the largest and most heavily-used databases, the biggest transaction-processing database was surpassed by the largest decision-support database, which wawas from France Telecom and stored 29.2 TB--a 300 percent gain over the top decision-support database ranked by Winter's 2001 survey.

Britain's Land Registry was the No. 1 transaction-processing database with 18.3 TB, almost 100 percent bigger than the 2001 winner in that category. The No. 2 decision-support database was a 26.2 TB repository from AT&T, and Sandy Hall of AT&T Labs reported that increasing needs to retrieve and analyze more historical data prompted AT&T to start storing two years worth of telecom network call data on its Security Call Analysis and Management Platform database rather than six months worth.

Meanwhile, Winter predicts that an ever-growing amount of data driven by the growth of the Internet and new devices such as RFID tags will lead to much larger databases in the near future; Winter survey respondents expect that the biggest databases will store approximately 60 TB within three years. Richard Winter says, "What people talk about most is that computers are getting faster and cheaper and that storage is getting faster and cheaper, but there are also hundreds and thousands of devices planted everywhere that are getting faster and cheaper."

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