australia access card, page-8

Its funny Mike I was expecting a response from PBills.
I have been trying to find something definitive about this company DSL but it does appear to be thrown together in short time.
As for claiming the high ground regarding petabyte scaling solutions and suggesting Microsoft was lagging behind seemed a bit hard to believe.

A brief on data; Bits= 1 bit; Bytes=8 bits(10 bytes a single word 100 bytes a sentence);Kilobyte=1024bytes;Megabyte=1024Kilobytes;Gigabyte=1024Megabytes;Terabyte=1024Gigabytes;Petabyte=1024Terabytes;then Exabytes,Yottabytes and Zettabytes.
A petabyte is 2 to the 50th power.Or 250billion pages of text.
Yahoo, Oracle and Google use such data bases.

In 2002 the cost to develop a Petabyte data base was estimated to be $500-$750 million. Now it is approx $100-$200 million. DSL has made an offer to the govt to roll out the system for zero upfront but wishes to charge $1 for each data exchange. So, correct me if Iam wrong, if 20 million people have just one exchange per month that would return $240million to DSL per annum. A very expensive solution if that is the case.

As for Microsoft Jim Gray oversaw the development of the Terraserver a 12 terabyte using SQL server 2000.Whilst it is true to say that petabytes is not in Microsofts word dictionary you don't have to look too far to find out why. Paul Flessner Senior Vice President reasons why April 2006 after the release of SQL Server 2005.
Rather than go into all that it has become clear from what research I have done that Linux and Unix outperform Microsofts SQL Server (at this point in time). ERG uses Linux (thanks Gavin).
They say most businesses will be using such storage in 5 years.No big deal.

The real issue remains data retrieval. DSL has not divulged the finer points of their business case in that paper which is just as well.
Anyway it doesn't matter the fact is DSL does not own a silver bullet, far from it.

cheers,
walt.