The amount of information produced in the world is increasing almost 30-40% every year. Trends imply that technology evolution is leading to information explosion from kilobytes to petabytes. The challenges of managing this becomes more difficult and this can lead to information overload or information fatigue.
Take for example, the telecom service industry in India. During 2005-2006, on an average, 5.5 million cellular lines were added every month, taking the mobile subscriber base to 157 million from 91 million during 2004-2005.
In another case, a large wireless service provider has a subscriber base of nearly 5 million subscribers. Imagine, on an average, every subscriber makes 20 calls per day. Each call generates a call detail record (CDR), which is used for calculating the bill and subsequent collection process. Each CDR implies a revenue opportunity for the telecom service provider. Around 100 millions of raw CDRs can be generated every day and they get transformed before reaching the billing system. All this data is further stored for 3 months online and subsequently archived.
Moreover, the same data is used for various other telecom applications like billing, customer care and business intelligence, which translates the total information to terabytes over the period.
This condition results from having a rapid rate of growth in the amount of information available. IT managers therefore, need to develop skills for managing this information overload. Managing this load can be a tough challenge. It involves securing, managing and archiving the data in such a way that appropriate executives have access to it and use that data for making more informed decisions.
An analysis of data reveals that 75% of it is never accessed, while barely 25% is accessed and maybe updated frequently. Thus, data can be described as being active, less active, historical or ready to be archived. In a traditional approach, the data is stored in large storage boxes and once the information is used, it is stored in secondary storage media like tapes. With flat file systems, this sounds simple. In a relational database management systems environment, it requires downtime for archival and retrieval. So managing the information is one of the key requirements in modern- day IT enabled business.
Information life cycle management (ILM) is one of the solutions for managing information overload. It is a combination of data management capabilities of the database server with appropriate storage technology.
Organisations that manage large volumes of data require self-managing databases. Financial services, communications and government organisations in India stand to gain greatly from using a database with an ILM platform.
Industry analysts claim that the worldwide relational database management systems market is poised for continued growth through 2010. The market will witness healthy growth, reflecting ongoing demand for relational database management systems, especially for online transaction processing, which have traditionally been the drivers of growth in the past.
The writer is director?database sales consulting, Oracle India