An Inconceivable Scale snippet from SQLServerCentral 12/9/2015

Here's a snippet from an email they sent me:

THE VOICE OF THE DBA
	An Inconceivable Scale One of the talks I give on SQL Server deals with unstructured data. I start out this talk looking at the scales of data we deal with and was been amazed by the research I did about how much data we humans have created. What's even more interesting is that the growth is outracing predictions made just a few years ago. When I started working with computers, we talked about kb of data, thousands of characters. That's an amount of data we humans can easily comprehend. In fact, we used to talk about floppy disks and the number of average sized books that could be stored in kb, or single digits of MBs. As humans, we can comprehend that scale. Most of us have seen hundreds or thousands of books in a library. When we move to GB, things get harder, though at 4GB for a DVD, many of us can conceive what multiple GBs can mean. However terabytes? Can we conceive the scale of data? Sure. A TB is about 40 Blu-ray disks. While we might not appreciate how much data that is, we can picture physically that scale of information. A PB? That's 41,000 Blu-ray disks. I can't even conceive of what that looks like, much less imagine the billion MB sized pictures.  That's a scale that has no reference. However as humans, we will create multiple exabytes (EB) of data this year, an order of magnitude beyond the PB. As individuals working with data, very few of us will ever work with EB in our organizations, but some of us will. I read recently that Paypal processes 1.1PB of data regularly. That's regularly processes, not just maintains in cold storage. We have zettabytes and yottabytes, but who could possibly conceive of what those mean? There's no frame of reference I can imagine to picture that much data, though that may change. Just as I expect that we will view PBs at some point just like we see TBs right now. A TB is no big deal, with many of us having that much storage in a desktop or laptop. In fact, I really think I'll see a TB on my phone sometime before the end of this decade. Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums The Voice of the DBA Podcast Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed atiTunes and LibSyn.  The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.