Would You Like Another Byte?

It happens every year.

You sit at the table, feeling full and wanting more.

So many choices are on the table for you. Having already sampled everything at least once, and despite no longer needing any additional calories, you stand up and stick your fork into plate of juicy turkey flesh. You take a huge slab of meat and an entire turkey leg, all roasted to perfection. You scoop out more mashed potatoes and slap them down next to the turkey on your plate. Next up is the stuffing, which fills up a third of your plate and then you cover everything in gravy.

The urge to consume more overwhelms you. You take more of the cranberry sauce. You’ve had cranberry sauce before but always from a can. This is the real stuff, from fresh cranberries, and is like nothing you have ever tasted before. How can you resist having more? You take a pinch of the savory green beans and top with a bit of sweet butter so that no one can remark about there being no vegetables on your plate. You then grab one last warm dinner roll to help mop up whatever is left in your plate after you gorge yourself for the next five minutes.

Oh, and don’t forget to pour yourself another extra large glass of wine, too.

As you stare at your plate your gaze becomes transfixed on the only slice of bacon pumpkin pie left. Will it still be there when you are done? Not wanting to take the chance you take that last piece of pie, too. You have no idea if you will ever be able to eat all of this food but it doesn’t matter. You want more. You must have more. The more you have, the better you feel.

And it’s not just food that you crave these days.

See, Thanksgiving comes but once a year. It’s easy to point out your urge to overeat during a holiday meal, because it is likely not a habit.

When it comes to data, however, you likely have the same urge to over consume.

You want all the data, all the time. You want it stored and accessible, all the time. Waiting an hour for IT to recover the data so you can look at a payroll report from 1995 is an unacceptable delay for you.

The sense of entitlement to all the data and demand for instant satisfaction is at an all-time high and only getting higher. As more and more software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms are offered it is becoming easier for folks to get all the data, all the time. It doesn’t matter if it will ever be used, it just matters that it could be used, if needed.

And much like all those extra calories going straight from your lips to your hips, all that extra data results in too much overhead for a business. You never think about a few extra calories being important until one day you wake up 30 pounds overweight. Well, a few dozen GBs of extra data a day doesn’t matter either until one day you have 30TB of data and you are still expecting your reports to run as fast as they did on the first day of the new system. End users often complain that performance is getting worse but it is critical they have access to data that spans decades even though their reports only go against the current year.

Much like your third helping of dinner on Thursday, you likely don’t need to have all that data readily available. All those extra bits add up in terms of storage costs. I’m not just talking about live storage, either. Every day your servers are backed up to tape and shipped offsite for storage. More data, more storage, more costs. Just like the cost of gas those costs rarely ever decrease with time. Performance of your systems degrade over time as well, much the same as if you keep overeating at every opportunity. I haven’t even talked about the length of time it takes to run backups, or recover such large amounts of data. Time is money, too, and if I tell someone it takes 24 hours to run recovery because of size…that is not as much fun as it may sound.

You need to make some choices. Either teach your end users to back away from the table because they don’t need all that data, or you need to accept the fact that SaaS and the Cloud in general is your future. Big Data and Hadooping are the buzzwords that represent a major shift in the landscape of our world of Data. This is a trend that is not likely to be reversed, ever.

The days of being tasked with the administering of data are growing smaller, because the data is growing larger, because people naturally will consume more whenever NVARCHAR(MAXGRAVY) is presented to them to consume.

Think about that when you reach for more pie on Thursday.