I'm wondering if we need to redefine what we think of a database after reading this article about the largest databases. I think that this article is likely a piece of journalism that I wouldn't expect to be completely accurate. After all, despite YouTube's phenomenal growth, I doubt most of the video content is actually in a database. Likely it's stored in a file system with just minimal meta data in a database that tracks all the various things we want to know about some video with a cat chasing string. Not that it's a small database, but I can't see it being overly large compared to some of the other companies mentioned.
If you read some of the descriptions in the article, you realize that the term "database" is being taken loosely by the author. The number one listing, the World Data Centre for Climate, has 6PB of data in "magnetic tapes" for "easy access." While I'm sure they have a lot of data, I'm not sure that those tapes qualify as part of a database.
Or do they? It's Friday, and I thought this might make an interesting poll for the data people out there.
Do we need to change our definition of a "database?"
I'm wondering if our verbiage, or vernacular, might need to change when discussing what a database is so both technical and non-technical people can understand each other. I'd hate to think that a manager thinks all the data in the sales organization, including spreadsheets, is part of the "sales database" when I'm thinking it's just the SQL Server instance.
While this might seem like silly, especially as the term "database" is embedded so deeply into our discussions. However already it's becoming hard to explain what a "server" is, even for SQL Server. I have heard many DBAs starting to refer to instances instead of servers as we have have multiple "SQL Servers" installed on one Windows host, which could be in a VM and multiple Windows "servers" on one physical piece of hardware.
It's confusing just thinking about it.
I have no idea who has the largest single database in the world, but I'm guessing it's one of the telecommunications companies.
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