Biggest Database in the UK?

Hmm, yea I see that there's a lot larger one's that you've suggested.

Maybe it's got to be something to do with how it's used, i.e. updated and altered by any member of staff anywhere in the country at any time?

I'll have to ask him next lecture.

Thanks for all the replies as well.
 
Experian or Equafax hold household data on almost everyone over 18 and they hold data for other companies as well for marketing purposes.
 
From what i remember BT's is quite big. Not only have you got all current BT users there are also people who have moved from each address who had BT. If you think back to when people didnt have a choice too, thats a hell of a lot of records.
 
The way I understood it there is no national database for all patients, it is split per trust!

Biggest isn't particularly that interesting. Now Complex, that is another matter.

I read Sybase has a data capacity of a Petabyte, but I imagine that is probably been outstripped by now.


I think what you really mean is data warehouse BTW and not 'database', which probably isn't going to be something well known.

I certainly wouldn't be handing out my enterprise architecture on the internet!

Re read your post and noticed you said 'people', so I would imagine it is something like the TV licence database as pretty much everyone has a TV or a Drivers licence database as pretty much everyone has a car or two in their house.

Failing that imigration
 
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I've been considering this for the last few mins, and I reckon there's some milliage in the HMRC and NI suggestions, but don't forget the likes of Mobile Operators, such as Orange and Vodafone - both being Global operations. The databases can store everything from customer addresses and notes to billing records - billing gereating the most information (would include topups and call histories for each number)
 
I would have throught one of the banks because people are doing banking transactions all the time and they are stored in a database.
 
Well for the data migration project I just worked on I was updating 500 million records. That was a retail DB.
 
markyp23 said:
Correct. I was wrong earlier. NHS employees hate how the systems are all independent.
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Strange, then why the opposition from a lot of quarters in the NHS as to the National Care Record? Fair enough, it may not be being implemented in a way that people are happy with, but a lot are opposed to the whole notion, thinking that the local GP should still hold the record for their patients and the hospitals/secondary care should update that record.

My money would be on the HMRC, though i would think it is not one database in total, but a compilation of databases with some kind of front end that shows it as one database
 
I would certainly say the NHS is up there, simply because the not everyone isnt registered to tax ;) but they are most certainly trying to register to receive NHS treatment.
 
PoD said:
I read Sybase has a data capacity of a Petabyte, but I imagine that is probably been outstripped by now.
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Plenty of database platforms have theoretical capacity of over one Petabyte, however there are very few that size. Sybase does not compete at the large-scale end of data warehouses. Neither does Oracle, which has a bigger market share, but again on the smaller-end databases. The really big databases are between IBM and Teradata.

What you also need to remember is that there are really two types of usage for databases:

Online transaction processing (OLTP). Generally used for loading transaction data and providing responses to very simple queries in near real-time. Not sure this is still current, however the UK Land Registry was apparently the largest OLTP database at 32TB ( http://www-01.ibm.com/software/succ...5H?OpenDocument&Site=eserverzseries&cty=en_us )

Analytical Databases. Used to hold very large volumes of detailed data (at customer, account, transaction level) and supports complex queries across any/all of that data. Teradata is the leader in this field, with US retailer Wal*Mart having the biggest, at over 460TB. The biggest UK one is between Tesco, Barclays, LloydsTSB and Vodafone, but I'm not 100% sure which is the biggest at the moment. Whichever one it is will certainly be over 200TB.

For more information here is an article by the Analyst firm Gartner, who produce annual comparisons between all of the database vendors.

http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/article19/article19.html

Regarding HMRC, NHS etc. just remember that whilst they might have a record for every person in the country, they don'y have very much data about each person (no regular 'transactions', balances etc.), so they tend to be much smaller.
 
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