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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."
Its an advertisement! Read the bottom: "Angus Kidman travelled to Orlando as a guest of Hyperion". The thing mentions Hyperion a dozen times, its the old trick of substituting news with press releases written by companies.
I always wondered where this setting was...
12 GB? You call that big? I haven't seen an Exchange mail store that small!
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I don't get it, that doesn't seem like much to me.
We have many databases that are larger here from MSSQL to Oracle, some around the 600GB mark.
What's so special about Google's database?
It's not only a press release, it's a very unimpressive one. Hyperion can handle data larger than 12 GB?! Stop the presses! You could manage a company of 50, maybe even 60 employees with that!
Plus, the "story" says that in order to manage such a large (*cough*) amount of data, the solution was to partition the database into 3 different parts. Now, I can see partitioning it for ease of management along functional areas, but certainly not because it grew to 12 whole gigabytes. If you can't handle chunks of data larger than 4 GB without partitioning it, you're in big trouble.
I'm guessing the "anonymous reader" who submitted this works for Hyperion.
This is the bit that gets me in the summary:
ZDNet has a short but interesting piece
Interesting to whom, precisely? Hyperion's marketing department? Scant technical details and really only notable for the link to the photos of Google's new Sydney office which are kind of interesting, I suppose, in an "ooh wow shiny...okay what's next?" kind of way.
Obviously that's 12 GOOGLE-Bytes*. Which are far huger than ordinary bytes, or even gigabytes, and therefore much more interesting.
* Note that GoogleBytes are still in beta and therefore the exact amount of storage in a single GB is yet to be determined.
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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.c ts
In Open Source land there are similar projects: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=olap§ion=proje
http://revj.sourceforge.net
So Google used horizontal partitioning to split load across servers? Wow, that's rocket science. None of us in the database community have thought of doing this before. :-) But, if you want to find some news here, you can. One nice thing that Google did recently was to donate their horizontal partitioning code for Hibernate to the open source community. Hibernate Shards definitely needs a lot of work to get it to the point where it does a lot of stuff that people would want, but, hey, release early and often!