>I can think of a few apps that may need that much data. Climatic modeling needs massive data. Maybe some massive engineering stress-point apps ....
>
>What I wonder is what sort of storage device could hold that DBF?
>
>
>>>Current estimates of numbers of stars in the galaxy are around 200 billion, so around 80Gb per star in the galaxy.
>>
>>Done it again, 3 extra zeroes this time - that should be 80Mb

Of course, the point is, the database server is capable of withstanding FUTURE growth in storage devices. It is quite annoying, for instance, that the FAT partitions can't stand more than 2 GB - because some 15 years ago, people thought we would NEVER reach that size!

And talking about future growth, I used to think, some years ago, that storage capacity would continue increasing, until each individual atom stores a bit - or a few bits.

However, if I understand recent investigations in Quantum Computing correctly, a quantum computer with a few thousand storage elements ("qubits") could store more bits of information than there are atoms in the known universe.

Hilmar.