The old Carl Sagan quote about billions and billions of stars in the universe doesn't seem so large anymore. In fact, a billion of anything, while a large number, seems immense only until we talk about the scale of data. How much data is there in the world? I'm not sure. As I was researching this for a new presentation, I'm not sure I can even conceive of the scale of data creation occurring in the world today, much less how much data we have.

Think back 30 years ago, as computers were just starting to become household items. The high density floppy disk (not really very floppy) was a 1.44MB disk. At the time, this held what felt like lots of data in terms of text pages. However many songs we listen to today wouldn't fit on this media. As we've progressed through CDs and DVDs to flash drives, we've grown the storage capacity of our hardware by unbelievable amounts. My phone has 64GB of storage, which is a level of growth so far removed from the Apollo guidance computer's 2kb that comparisons don't do it justice.

Read the rest of "Zettabytes and Beyond" at SQLServerCentral.