Archive - Where it started and the Problems of Perpetuity

In the last mass storage conference, the term "yotta bytes"(1024) surfaced. That is not an unimaginable amount of data given the yield rates of advanced technologies, and yet for comparison, it's probably a couple of orders of magnitude more than all the stars in the universe. In 1934 before the age of computing, T.S. Eliot foresaw a fundamental problem with what seemed to be a data explosion, when he wrote a dramatic poem, "The Rock", where he lamented, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Then more recently in 1985 just as the computer revolution was beginning to take hold, David Byrne wrote a song which goes, "In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it." And more recently, Joel Achenback or the Washington Post stated; "The moment in the future when so many technologies have converged - computers, miniaturization, bio-medicine - that they have become auto-catalytic, driving one another to yet greater sophistication, hyperaccelerating." It is these factors which contribute to the woes for today's data manager in managing and parsing data for access from the ever growing volumes and complexity of data.