'Tis the season of benchmarks

And the season kicked off May 13 with the Guinness record for World's Largest Data Warehouse.

"Sybase IQ has set a Guinness World Record by powering the world's largest data warehouse on a Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server. The winning combination: Sybase IQ analytics server, Sun Microsystems Data Warehouse Reference Architecture, and BMMsoft Server manages 1 Petabyte of raw data holding 6 trillion rows of transactional data. The solution enables more data to be stored in less space, searched and analyzed in less time, while consuming 91 percent less energy and generating less heat and carbon dioxide than conventional solutions." - excerpt from a "Sybase Partner News" email

Petabyte? What is a petabyte, anyway? Is it 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, as in quadrillion?

Or is it 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, as in 1000 terabytes?

I'm not sure I really care... at the moment, anyway... someday the difference might be important to me, when I go shopping for my first 1 PB drive (you don't think that will ever happen? hah! just wait!)

In the meantime, it's fun to watch happy people celebrate on youtube.