Fascinating. This is an intervew with Bob Wilson, vice-president of HP's Storage Platforms Division. While he doesn't mention SQL specifically, in the business world, SQL and Oracle reign king. He compares the advantages of deduplication technology (JD, Server Edition) with databases versus, are you ready: PACs. Don't know if your hospitals use Pacs, but it stands for Picture Archiving and Communication Systems. They don't change so de-dupe doesn't help much.

BM. Can you outline some of the common mistakes or pitfalls that customers should be aware of as they implement virtual tape libraries with deduplication?
BW. Probably the biggest one is comparing technologies based numbers being quoted for deduplication ratios delivered by products in the industry. It turns out that what ratio you will actually get is mostly dependent on a few things: the type of data, your backup policy, how frequently data changes and how you measure the ratio. For example, PACs are ‘picture archiving and communication systems,’ a type of data used in X-rays and medical imaging. These have very little duplicate data. At the other end of the spectrum, databases contain a lot of redundant data, their structure means that there will be many records with empty fields or the same data in the same fields.

Bert
Pediatrics
Brewer, Maine