The database frontier

Jay’s opening lines regarding the final MySQL Conference keynote speaker was: “I work with a lot of data. I think peta-bytes, maybe exa-bytes”. This was relating to Jacek Becla from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, giving his presentation on “The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analytics”.

The goal of the Large Synoptics Survey Telescope (LSST) is the storage of 50+ PB of images and 20+ PB data.
Let’s just clarify the size. 20 PB of data = 20 years of HD Movies = 2000 years of 128kb MP3

The next database frontier is obviously building huge databases. What part will MySQL or other relational databases play? Some interesting facts were.

  • The Digital Universe Created 161 Exabytes of data last year.
  • Google, processes 20 petabytes of data per day.

The Operational plan for LSST Project Timeline is 10 years, only starting in 2014. The timeline:

  • 2009 Choosing Technology
  • 2010-2014 constructions
  • 2014-2023 production

The primary goals are: Scale, parallelize, fault tolerant.

Tagged with: Databases MySQL MySQL User Conferences MySQL Users Conference 2008

Related Posts

What Constitutes Clean Data?

Clean data is one of those terms everyone uses and few define precisely. Row counts match? No nulls in key columns? Values within expected ranges? All useful checks — and all insufficient once you move from a table view to a visualization view.

Read more

Curated MySQL Data Sets for Realistic Testing

Synthetic benchmarks have their place, but I have always preferred working with real data. Not client production data — that stays private — but publicly available datasets that reflect the messy shapes, skewed distributions, and indexing challenges you encounter in the wild.

Read more

COSCUP 2026: Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7

I recently had the pleasure of presenting Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7 at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and the community there is always engaged and technically sharp.

Read more