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

Re:WTF WTF?

[pasamio]

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.

Re:WTF WTF?

[eln]

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.

12 GB is not 12 gigs.

[nathan s]

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.

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.