Data, Data, Everywhere

This past Thursday I was in Detroit to give a couple of presentations to the Michigan DB2 User Group and one of the presentation topics started to swirl around my mind a bit. You see, one of the pitches I gave was on Database Trends. In this pitch I talk about all of the major things that are impacting the DBMS marketplace. One of the major impacts is data growth.

Businesses today are gathering and storing more data than ever before. We are said to be living in the "information age," and data is the capital of the new economy. With this explosion in the amount of data being stored, organizations are relying more than ever on data storage, technology and management to get a handle on corporate data and extract useful business information from that raw data.

I visit a lot of different organizations each year as a part of my job, and one thing is consistent: Databases are growing in size. I've never had a DBA say to me, "You know, my databases are getting smaller, and I just can't handle it." Nope, it is always just the opposite. Organizations everywhere are struggling with the burgeoning size of their corporate databases.

As my mind started to wander on the way back to the airport for the flight home, I got to thinking about data growth on a smaller scale -- that is, a personal scale. Yes, yes, we all know that corporations are creating and storing more data. But so are people. As I scanned my rental car thinking about this I saw the bag that stores my laptop computer. The hard drive on that thing is a lot bigger than the disk drives I used on the first mainframes with which I worked (yes, that dates me somewhat... so does the grey in my beard).

Then I saw the latest and greatest techie doo-dad that I purchased, a Magellan 700 GPS. This nifty little global-positioning system makes it much easier to travel - which I do a lot of. It has a 10 GB hard drive that stores maps for all the roads in North America - as well as a lot of other great information on retaurants, airports, etc. And it means I don't have to go to Mapquest before every trip to map out my path from the airport to the hotel and/or customer site. But that is 10 GB more data that I carry around on my person.

Now I also have an MP3 player to wile away my time on the planes. This little gadget has 30 GB of data and I have it stuffed to the brim with songs from my personal CD collection (I am too old to risk jail time or having my computer destroyed by downloading songs illegally).

And my cell phone has some storage on it because it is a Kyocera smartphone that combines a PDA with my phone.  And, geek that I am, I have a Filemaker Mobile database installed on that phone that stores information on all of my CD collection - just in case I find a great record/CD store on the road. So there is some more "personal" storage.

Finally, I sometimes carry a digital memo recorder to record ideas and thoughts I get while traveling. There isn't a lot of storage on that thing, but there is some. If I were on vacation, we'd have to add my digital camera and the storage sticks and little hard drive I have for that, too. And that would only cover what I had with me. I've got five or six PCs at home, all networked together, along with a Maxtor network-attached storage drive for backup.

So I guess I am a walking, talking information dump. You know, one of my managers called me an "information bottom-feeder" several years ago and I always took it as a compliment. But now I'm not so sure she meant it that way at all!