Some organizations are already caught in that flood. Consider Facebook. Already host to more digital photos than any other company, Facebook is building new storage and processing infrastructure as fast as it can. Yet it is pushing the database technology it is using to the limit, splitting its famed social graph across 4,000 databases that must all work together as one, Stonebraker says. “They are just dying under the load of the management layer needed to keep this system up,” he says. “They have the hardest database problem on the planet, and there’s no current system that will meet their needs.” (via Bracing for the Data Deluge – Technology Review)