ladykatza

So, for work, I’m studying up on database languages. Namely, mysql. The intro that I am reading had the following to say:

MySQL handles databases up to 50 million rows or more. The default file size limit for a table is 4 GB (gigabytes) but can be increased to (if you have a system that can handle it) to a theoretical limit of 8 MILLION terabytes.

HOLY COW! EIGHT MILLION TERABYTES??? Do you have any idea the SIZE of that? I mean, for the most part we are talking about a completely abstract number because humans can’t THINK that large on average. I had to do some number crunching to figure it out.

Alright, take your standard digital camera and look at the info printed on it. Right now, most people are still using 5-8 megapixel cameras. On average one picture, saved in a standard JPEG format is about 1.536 megabytes. What this means is that your 1 gig memory card can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 pictures.

Ok, now lets take this theoretical database and increase it to its maximum size. Then we’re going to convert the 8 million terabytes(TB) into megabytes(MB). It looks something like this:

8,000,000 TB = 8,388,608,000,000 MB

Wow, you say, that’s a lot of numbers. What does it mean, what do I care? Well, now let’s take the average file size of those pictures you take and divide it into that really really big number.

8,388,608,000,000 MB / 1.536 MB = 5,461,333,330,000 pictures stored which would be the equivalent of 9,102,222,220 cameras with 1GB chips worth of pictures.

This means that each of the 6,602,224,175 people on this planet could store 1.4 GB worth of pictures on this one server.

Has your head exploded yet?