Wal-Mart’s Plans For Its 4-Petabyte Database
Written by Evan SchumanAugust 3rd, 2007
When the world's largest retailer struggles with a database issue, the numbers can be a bit daunting. It's datawarehouse, for example, is larger than 4 Petabytes. That's more than 4,096 TBytes, give or take a few million bits.
The chain has more than 6,000 stores, with some having almost a half-million SKUs each. You think your Excel spreadsheets are bad? Wal-Mart's database tables have literally 100 billion rows. The retailer's POS systems have to ring up some 276 million items—a day.
This peek into the IT operations of this $345 billion retail empire comes courtesy of a phone interview with Wal-Mart Chief Technology Officer Nancy Stewart.
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
Is there really an improvement between a mag swipe and contactless tap if multi-factor authentication is required?
-Ed
