I'd been a database industry analyst for a decade before I found 1-gigabyte databases to write about. Now it's 15 years later, and the 1-petabyte barrier is crumbling. Specifically, we're about to see production data warehouses -- running on commercial database management systems -- that contain over 1 petabyte of actual user data. Greenplum is slated to have two of them within 60 days. Given how close it was a year ago, Teradata may have crossed the 1-petabyte mark by now too. And by the way, Yahoo already has a petabyte+ database running on a home-grown system.

Meanwhile, the 100-terabyte mark is almost old hat. Besides the vendors already mentioned above, others with 100+ terabyte databases deployed include Netezza, DATAllegro, Dataupia, and even SAS.