Hence the updated terminology VHDB, or very huge database. Storage Abbreviations Abbrev. There are many factors influencing organizations to support and foster this growth. People are creating data warehouses to enable analytical processing on vast amounts of historical data. And they are creating a lot of indexes on this data to enable rapid data access.
Indexes require even more storage space, further increasing the overall size of the database.
Data mining is fast becoming a requirement whereby heuristic algorithms are applied to historical data to automatically discover patterns in the data that can be exploited for competitive advantage. The more data there is, the better the quality of the data is, and the quality of the pattern discovery algorithms determines the value of the data mining applications. So people are inclined to store more data for a longer period of time. Hardware improvements also spur this growth along. The hard drive in my laptop computer is bigger than the first mainframe hard drives I worked with years ago.