The USB Issue
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Actually it's not a USB issue, but more of a portability problem. I caught this article on USB devices and critical data being put on these devices because of the tremendous capacity available. Nowadays you can buy a 500GB drives that actually looks like a CD case (shown above). I know because I bought one to store some data and if you weren't looking closely, you'd think it was a CD case. It could also pass for a book on a shelf. In fact, I can see people concealing these devices in all sorts of ways and bringing them in and out of work.
Last week at the Colorado Code Camp I was talking with a friend who does a lot of BI work. He remarked that he liked his new job because he could fit all the data on his laptop and take it home for work and testing. Not something that's easy to do if you have a 10TB warehouse.
As handy as that can be, this is one of those cases where smaller shops actually have more problems than larger ones. If you have the 270TB warehouse (there is one on SQL Server), then it's not likely someone will suck out all your data onto a device. They might get some, but not all of it. However if you have a 10GB db of credit card data, someone could drop that whole thing on an iPod and upload it to the Internet during a Starbucks run.
Security is important and pay attention to your data.
The Winter Corporation is due to update their Top Ten database survey this year and it will be interesting to see what the results are. If you look at the 2005 Results, in the data warehousing category, there is only 1 SQL Server installation for the All Environments category (UPSS, 19.4TB). The top ten for Windows range from 4.2TB to the 19.4TB range, which is large for me, but in the overall scheme of things, this isn't a large warehouse.
However at the Code Camp, Kevin Cox of Microsoft gave a keynote and talked about a 270TB warehouse that they are working with a customer on. Now that's a big database. Even if it is a lot of BLOB data, just dealing with 270TB of static data would be a challenge. I'd love to see more details about how you work with that much data and I'm hoping Microsoft publishes more results from real customer experiences.
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Some serious db sizes. We have two 3 TB Oracle dbs (growing by 300 gig a week now), two 1 TB Oracle dbs and a DB2 WHSE that is 1 TB. Our biggest SQL db is 95 gig (growing by 1.5 gig a week now).
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Back in 2000, I had to put a 12 GB database into SQL 6.5, and I basically used a programming solution to split the data into logical units, then I had to write special access procedures into all the stored procs. It was a pain but it worked. It's used to drive Schwab's foreign market data reports on their web site. Later, when we updated to SQL 2005, it was able to handle the whole database just fine, but 6.5 totally choked on it, and it was totally unusable, if you could even get the whole DB loaded. As far as I know, it's still being used, although SQL2005 can handle much larger data sets so it never was a problem after the update.
And I do have my Western Digital hard drive on a book shelf. It looks just like the photo, but there's no actual books on that shelf so it doesn't get mistaken for something it's not.
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