The Economist this week is very choice. If you have the means, I suggest you pick it up. There’s a whole special report on data, why they’re interesting, and how much we’re creating. (I remade these two charts to make them prettier for the internets. Feel free to steal/share.)
Fascinating:
- “Wal-Mart processes 1M transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes”
- “Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specializing on data management and analytics.” (And to think I had to ARGUE with people about the value of this whole digital thing.)
- Bing’s Farecast service analyzes 225 million flight and price records to give you better deals.
- CERN’s Large Hadron Collider generates 40 terabytes every second (when it’s on).
- “By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco.”
Data are cool. More on this later.
Comments
1M transactions every hour? That’s pretty cool. But that 2.5 petabyte database is probably not true. It’s more likely several smaller databases, like 1 per state or so.