Some Challenges in Building Petabyte Data Stores

Jim Gray, Ph.D. 
Microsoft Research

Seminar Hosts:
UCSF Medical Information Sciences Program and  UCSF Molecular Design Institute 

3:00PM
March 6, 2000
HSW 302

Abstract

The talk begins with a short survey of some BIG databases we face in the next decade. The web is about a Terabyte of HTML. Satellite image databases grow that much in a few hours. The Sloan Sky Survey will be 40 terabytes, EOS/DIS will be 15 Petabytes. Then there is the global digital library that will record everything everywhere. After this motivation and a short demonstration of the Russian/American satellite image TerraServer we are building, discussion shifts to simple storage metrics: MAPS and SCANS are better storage performance metrics than KAPS (KB objects accessed per second). When combined with $/MAPS and $/SCAN, they show why tape is doomed as a near-line storage device. The talk revisits the 5 minute rule for trading off DRAM for disk accesses. Then it pops back to the global level and assess our progress in building reliable storage systems (good) and HSMs (abysmal). 

Biographical Summary:

Dr. Gray is a specialist in database and transaction processing computer systems. At Microsoft his research focuses on scaleable computing: building super-servers and workgroup systems from commodity software and hardware. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Digital, Tandem, IBM and AT&T on database and transaction processing systems. He is editor of the Performance Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems, and co-author of Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the ACM, a member of the Presidents IT Advisor Council (PITAC), and Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series on Data Management. He received the 1998 Turing award for his work on transaction processing and database systems. 

Jim Gray, Microsoft Research, 301 Howard St #830, SF CA 94105 tel: 415-778-8222 fax -8210 Gray@Microsoft.com http://research.microsoft.com/~gray 

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