[dba-Tech] A couple of great articles on latest and greatest

For a brief moment there Terabyte was the size ultimate but that point
passed quickly and the computer world went on to Pentabyte; well that point
of ultimate has now again been surpassed as we have Zettabytes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/03/humanity-digital-output-zet
tabyte

Some latest information from some who have been experimenting with the new
super database called Cassandra. Notice through the performances trials the
CPU utilization remains flat! The team pushed the product to see where
better utilization could be achieved and noted setting caching would help
performance... But keep in mind this DBs performance is so far beyond our
standard SQLs.

http://jamesgolick.com/2010/4/4/two-weeks-with-cassandra.html

An aside: It will be a while before the hard drive bottle-neck is really
fully resolved. Right now splitting a data store across numerous drives, all
indexed and cashed is the only way to lessen the performance pain. That is
why the new breed of distributive databases are so fast because they manage
the hardware layer so well. Our current crop of standard SQLs just leave the
hardware to manage it's self.
  
Jim