Keeping Google's In-house Database Ticking

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has a short but interesting piece on the what Google did with its 12GB database when it became a challenge for the finance department. The database was split into three, says Chris Schulze, technical program manager for Google — one for the current financial planning projections, one for the actual current data from existing HR and general ledger systems, and one storing historic information. The article says Google has been using a variety of products from Hyperion (recently bought by Oracle) to manage its internal financial systems since 2001."

OLAP is a different beast

[alxtoth]

12 Gb of _relational_ database falls under "nothing to see, move along". But Essbase http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essbase [wikipedia.org] is doing OLAP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLAP [wikipedia.org] , which means that data is pre-aggregated across multiple _hierarchies_ . Those 150 users are likely the top management looking at the revenue, or reviewing the budget.
In Open Source land there are similar projects: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=olap&section=projec ts [freshmeat.net]

Re:Only 12GB?

[alxtoth]

TFA is about a _cube_ of 12 Gb . Not _relational_ database. Read my other post http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232 481&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=1889 9385#18899875 [slashdot.org]

Re:Only 12GB?

[hemp]

Google's Hyperion database is an OLAP ( on-line analytical processing ) database rather than an OLTP ( on-line transaction processing ) database. OLAP databases are optimized more for processing human queries rather than standard transactions (like most MSSQL and Oracles are). Hyperion incorporates multi-demensional data hierarchies and other data formats that are difficult if not impossible to model in straight SQL(think of a Rubik's cube in 7 demensions).

The downside of this approach is that it can cause lengthy time periods when the cubes needs to be re-calculated. In Google's case, evidently, this took 48 hours.

Oh, my!

[Jerky McNaughty]

So Google used horizontal partitioning [wikipedia.org] to split load across servers? Wow, that's rocket science. None of us in the database community have thought of doing this before. :-) But, if you want to find some news here, you can. One nice thing that Google did recently was to donate their horizontal partitioning code for Hibernate to the open source community. Hibernate Shards [hibernate.org] definitely needs a lot of work to get it to the point where it does a lot of stuff that people would want, but, hey, release early and often!

Re:12gb?

[yahooadam]

you can practically gather from the summary, without even RTFA that this is talking about google's financial database, which is most likely used to find out how Google is doing, nothing to do with the services Google offer the public