I think very on-topic, but if you read the article, they modified PostgreSQL to be columnar instead of row-based. This holds up with another school of thought from folks like Vertica that column-oriented databases are the "way to go" to scale to these types of data sizes and ranges. Yet another variant on the traditional RDBMS for specific uses. They also mentioned that yahoo acquired the technology from a small startup, and then adapted it. Matt ________________________________ From: David Ballester [mailto:ballester.david@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 2:58 PM To: Matthew Zito Cc: dbvision@xxxxxxxxxxxx; Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam Now certainly, you can build a >100TB Oracle instance, but the cost and the complexity would be challenging. In addition, presumably they only see this data store growing, and how do you deal with a 200, 300, 400TB Oracle instance? Google, for example, in 2006 had approximately 1.2PB of data in their structured data store. Heaven knows what it is now. semi off topic Yahoo has a datawarehouse of 2PB and 24 Bilions of 'events' ( changes? ) per day. They got postgresql source code and rebuild some parts to meet their needs Afaik, they are very happy with the results http://www.dbms2.com/2008/05/29/yahoo-scales-web-analytics-database-peta byte/ D.