Biggest Database in the UK?

Selekt0r said:
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What he said, Teradata, Netezza et al (including Oracle!) are behind the biggest databases/datawarehouses - but I'm pretty certain the figures you quoted for the sizes are a little on the small side. A friend told me that his dealings with Barclays has his team playing with Petabytes, rather than Terabytes of data. And as you said, there are bigger commercial/financial institutions. But then, he could be chatting ****. :)

As for the OP, I'd put a tenner on NI - doing a lil bit of admittedly flawed research on Wikipedia show National Insurance to have been around the longest.
 
You'd be surprised how much data the passport office has on a person, and since they merged with the office of national statistics, they have data on every person's birth, death, still birth, marriage etc (for the living and dead). They also have data from credit reference agencies etc. Plus they keep an electronic image of all application forms and other documents an applicant supplies.
 
Never thought of them, but I can imagine there's to be absolutely huge, most security services would probably have massive databases.
 
Currently AFAIK the NHS has not centralised all of its records. Each trust may have its own DB. Most of our records are still retained in paper form.

I would put my money on something like the passport office, DVLA, HMRC, land registry, or possibly whoever deals with birth and death certificates (if centralised)
 
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Dunno if it's Thomas Cook database to be honest as they hold every single flight/holiday details that UK citizens take and that's been ongoing since the late 80's.
 
Why do you ask? planning on saving the government some humiliation and just stealing it, instead of letting them lose the info?
 
Depends on your definition of "largest" do you mean largest in number of records, number of bytes?

Im pretty sure BT has the crown for the largest single database. I remember hearing that OSS was approaching a Petabyte when I worked there in 1999. I could have been mislead though.
 
mpledge52 said:
Well i'm doing an assignment and its about the new NHS Care Record System. Thats going to be around 50-60 million when finished, and according to my lecturer that's going to be the biggest, and by a a long way. (In the UK anyway).
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The SPINE database is already well over 50 million records (way over) and is not fully utilised yet. Oracle trumpet it as one of the largest Oracle database in the world, let alone UK.

PoD said:
The way I understood it there is no national database for all patients, it is split per trust!
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Not quite, there is in fact a database for all patients registered in the UK, and it is centralised. The confusion is that it co-exists with all the trusts local systems, and the local systems will update "snapshots" of demographic and medical data to the centralised database.

(edit - also with SPINE it's not just sheer volume of data, it's also required to be extremely fast. Thousands of users all pulling data from all across the UK and the system has to deliver 100% 24/7)
 
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I'd got for NI for most people on it.

I was told, when I joined BT back in 1998, that their system CSS was by far and away the largest database in the UK, but tha was in terms of total data items stored, not individual person records.
 
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