Keeping Google's In-house Database Ticking

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has a short but interesting piece on the what Google did with its 12GB database when it became a challenge for the finance department. The database was split into three, says Chris Schulze, technical program manager for Google — one for the current financial planning projections, one for the actual current data from existing HR and general ledger systems, and one storing historic information. The article says Google has been using a variety of products from Hyperion (recently bought by Oracle) to manage its internal financial systems since 2001."

Comments

OLAP is a different beast

[alxtoth]

12 Gb of _relational_ database falls under "nothing to see, move along". But Essbase http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essbase is doing OLAP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLAP , which means that data is pre-aggregated across multiple _hierarchies_ . Those 150 users are likely the top management looking at the revenue, or reviewing the budget.
In Open Source land there are similar projects: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=olap&section=projec ts

Re:Only 12GB?

[hemp]

Google's Hyperion database is an OLAP ( on-line analytical processing ) database rather than an OLTP ( on-line transaction processing ) database. OLAP databases are optimized more for processing human queries rather than standard transactions (like most MSSQL and Oracles are). Hyperion incorporates multi-demensional data hierarchies and other data formats that are difficult if not impossible to model in straight SQL(think of a Rubik's cube in 7 demensions).

The downside of this approach is that it can cause lengthy time periods when the cubes needs to be re-calculated. In Google's case, evidently, this took 48 hours.