Depending on the type of information system and the characteristics of the business, these data could vary from a few
megabytes on just one or two topics to terabytes covering hundreds of topics within the business’s internal and external
environment. Telecommunications companies such as Sprint and AT&T are known to have systems that keep data on
trillions of phone calls, with new data being added to the system at speeds up to 70,000 calls per second!1 Not only
do these companies have to store and manage immense collections of data, they have to be able to find any given fact
in that data quickly. Consider the case of Internet search staple Google. While Google is reluctant to disclose many
details about its data storage specifications, it is estimated that the company responds to over 91 million searches per
day across a collection of data that is several terabytes in size. Impressively, the results of these searches are available
almost instantly.