Worlds Largest Database - BaBar

While most of us are struggling to solve the issues around TeraByte data storage and management, folks at Stanford are ready for handling PetaByte( 1024 TeraByte) of data with BaBar database. In 2004 Stanford LAC collected 500,000 GB in a day, thus a multi-petabytes of data getting stored is very near. Note that such challenges are not limited to reasearch groups. Wal-Mart is assumed to be storing somewhere near to 580 TeraByte of sales and inventory data, also EBAY stores 100s of TeraByte of consumer data.

There is an interesting article posted at Standford website giving an overview of challenge faced in storing and managing such large data which is worth a read. You can refer it by clicking Here


Here are some interesting data for starter:

1) DataStorage happens at IBM MSS storing 1.3 Petabyte in 13,000 tapes managed by 6 StorageTek tape silos.

2) Data is backed by 160 TeraByte of disk Cache for responsiveness.Disk cache is mainted by thousands of physical disks maintained by large disk arrays.

3) For multi-petabyte scalability uses ODBMS approach with Thick client and Thin Server approach. Uses Objectivity/DB

4) Database runs on 2000 CPUs with 100 servers supporting.