Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Worldwide Production of Original Content, Stored Digitally, in Terabytes
*
Table 1.1
*
Source:
University of California at Berkeley study, 1999.
1.1). In fact this probably was a great turning point in the history of the development of
western civilization. For over 2,000 years civilization has stored data in written text—on
parchment, papyrus, or paper. Suddenly and quietly that paradigm has begun to sunset.
Now the digitization of text is not only of interest for sharing and analysis, but it is also
more economical.
The dramatic growth patterns change the amount of data that relational database
systems must access and manipulate, but they do not change the speed at which opera-
tions must complete. In fact, to a large degree, the execution goals for data processing
systems are defined more by human qualities than by computers: the time a person is
willing to wait for a transaction to complete while standing at an automated banking
machine or the number of available off-peak hours between closing time of a business in
the evening and the resumption of business in the morning. These are constraints that
are defined largely by what humans expect and they are quite independent of the data
volumes being operated on. While data volumes and analytic complexity are growing
