If you take all of the vbulletins in 1m+ post thread

[poolking]

So If you took all of the vbulletin boards posted in the 1m+ post thread,
combined all of the users and posts, etc into one mega database, what size would you reckon the database would be?

Could it reach 1 terabyte or beyond?

[Tolitz]

Could it reach 1 terabyte or beyond?

That sounds about right ... just for the attachment tables

[N9ne]

That sounds about right ... just for the attachment tables

I'd hate to see the size of the attachments table...

The DB size would probably hit 1TB, yeah.

[poolking]

I think by that point you would be nearly reaching the limits of MySQL?

[merk]

afaik, Thats already past the limits of a standard mysql setup.

Im sure there would be alot of source code modification needed to make it run smooth.

Though, i doubt you could combine the databases without many man hours of manual labour :|

[poolking]

Taken from the MySQL manual:

MySQL Version 3.22 had a 4 GB (4 gigabyte) limit on table size. With the MyISAM table type in MySQL Version 3.23, the maximum table size was pushed up to 8 million terabytes (2 ^ 63 bytes).

In effect, then, the table size for MySQL databases is normally limited by the operating system.

Note, however, that operating systems have their own file-size limits. Here are some examples:

Operating System File-Size Limit
Linux-Intel 32 bit 2 GB, much more when using LFS
Linux-Alpha 8 TB (?)
Solaris 2.5.1 2 GB (possible 4GB with patch)
Solaris 2.6 4 GB (can be changed with flag)
Solaris 2.7 Intel 4 GB
Solaris 2.7 UltraSPARC 512 GB

On Linux 2.2 you can get tables larger than 2 GB in size by using the LFS patch for the ext2 filesystem. On Linux 2.4 patches also exist for ReiserFS to get support for big files. Most current distributions are based on kernel 2.4 and already include all the required Large File Support (LFS) patches. However, the maximum available file size still depends on several factors, one of them being the file system used to store MySQL tables.

For a very detailed overview about LFS in Linux, have a look at Andreas Jaeger's "Large File Support in Linux" page at http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html.

By default, MySQL tables have a maximum size of about 4 GB. You can check the maximum table size for a table with the SHOW TABLE STATUS command or with the myisamchk -dv table_name. See section 4.5.7 SHOW Syntax.

If you need a table that will be larger than 4 GB in size (and your operating system supports it), set the AVG_ROW_LENGTH and MAX_ROWS parameters accordingly when you create your table. See section 6.5.3 CREATE TABLE Syntax. You can also set these parameters later, with ALTER TABLE. See section 6.5.4 ALTER TABLE Syntax.

If your big table is a read-only table, you could use myisampack to merge and compress many tables into one. myisampack usually compresses a table by at least 50%, so you can have, in effect, much bigger tables. See section 4.7.4 myisampack, The MySQL Compressed Read-only Table Generator.

You can get around the operating system file limit for MyISAM datafiles using the RAID option. See section 6.5.3 CREATE TABLE Syntax.

Another solution can be the included MERGE library, which allows you to handle a collection of identical tables as one. See section 7.2 MERGE Tables.