Stat of the Week: 1/1/2007

According to the book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle.

Google uses 175,000 computers to power its search engine.

It's no wonder. Google houses the text of nearly every site on the web. That's big. Now, consider response time of that giant database. For example, the query for business intelligence returns in 73 hundredths of a second. That's fast.

If Google can return queries against the entire World Wide Web in less than 1 second, surely the average Data Warehouse can perform better than it does. Though most of us do not have 175,000 computers at our disposal, we do have clustering, indexes, aggregate navigation, and other mechanisms that can substantially improve performance. "Too much data." can no longer be the response to "Why don't my query run faster?"