I work for a firm that does marketing for 90+ car dealerships around the US. A big part of what we do to prep for data mining is standardizing and importing data from assorted dealership systems, some archaic and some not (ADP, R&R, Advent, Arkona, Quorum, Scorekeeper, etc.), and this sometimes requires processing service files of up to 200-300 MB with hundreds of thousands of records. Theoretical maximum could be even larger. Input format might be CSV or more of a vertical text format (key value), depending on how we're acquiring the data, but it's always text and never fixed-length. We use custom Perl scripts / mySQL for the most part, and we recently upgraded to a pretty fast server with 4 GB RAM (Cari.net, their pricing and service is pretty good and we also had our previous server there). OS is of course some popular Unix variant that I forget.

EDIT: We also import sales, leases, and a variety of other stuff, but the service file is just the largest part of that. I imagine the databases in uncompressed form could run upwards of 500 MB to a GB each over time.

In reply to Re: Biggest file? by TJPride
in thread Biggest file? by BrowserUk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.