Accenture: The Architecture of Business Intelligence

Many companies today are collecting and storing a mind-boggling quantity of data. The numbers are hard to fathom: in just a few years, the common terminology for data volumes has grown from megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes (a trillion bytes). The size of some corporate databases is even approaching one petabyte (a quadrillion bytes). Just how much data is this? To put the 583 TB in Wal-Mart’s databases into perspective, for example, consider that in 2006, U.S. Library of Congress’s print collection was roughly 20 TB. And gargantuan storage is not the only technological frontier: high-end 64-bit processors and specialty “data appliances” can quickly churn through virtually unfathomable amounts of data.