InsightIQ Blog

A terabyte is not what it used to be...

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Mar 8 2009

Multiple times within the past couple of years I have walked into clients who have built marketing data marts that for all practical purposes can be considered failures. Users were unhappy primarily because reports took too long to execute, and because the IT folks could not keep the data mart up to date.  

What I found surprising about these situations was not the user complaints, but that clients were struggling to build usable systems when the total volume of data they had to deal with was less than one terabyte. One terabyte used to be an impressive volume of data, back in 1998. Nowadays, you can walk into any Target store in the US and buy a 1 terabyte hard drive for $169.99. More importantly, building analytical data marts that can easily handle tens and even hundreds of terabytes is a solved problem. Companies like Yahoo have built petabyte-scale databases specifically designed to analyze the huge volumes of data that consumer-facing web sites generate.  

The technology and knowledge to handle huge data sets is available and easily accessible, so the good news for our clients is that their problems are easily solvable. Now we just need to convince them that one terabyte is not what it used to be.

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