] For its Top Ten Program, Winter Corp. gathers voluntary
] submissions from companies worldwide that are running
] large databases. The program requires that the databases
] must be in production and contain at least 1 terabyte of
] data (or 500 megabytes of data if running on Windows).
] The results, divided into 24 categories, are based on the
] amount of online data running on the database.
]
] The largest decision-support database in this year's
] survey is from France Telecom and handles 29.2 terabytes
] of data, triple the size of the top database in that
] category in Winter's last survey in 2001.

This is an interesting analog to the list of top supercomputers. Although supercomputers are typically used for number crunching and data-mining rather than decision support, it is interesting to speculate what the marriage between a very large database and a supercomputer oriented toward decision support would look like and what it would cost.

Survey: Databases Push Toward New Heights