How large can SQLServer scale?

I'm considering options for a large scale data warehouse. Even though SQL can theorectially scale to 10 Terabytes plus, in practice - will it be able to do it? Has anyone else actually done it? Or should Oracle be used?This is blasphemy...

Oracle

Scale out not up...

Get some serious hardware and a lot of cash...

Why 10 terabytes...

What the subject matter?|||You get into a matter of what makes sense.

1 gigabyte is trivial. MSDE will eat that alive, and ask for more.

10 gigabytes is easy. It is beyone the range of MSDE, and probably needs somebody to casually watch over it.

100 gigabytes is more challenging, you need to at least pay attention to what you are doing. A full time dba starts to make sense.

1 terabyte requires serious planning. You need to think through what you are doing, have enterprise grade hardware, and leash the bozos so that they don't make a mess of your data.

10 terabytes is where the systems I know about start to peter out. There are a few dozen of them like Terraserver (http://terraserver.microsoft.com/) and Barnes and Noble (http://www.bn.com), but they aren't all that common.

160 terrabytes is the limit that I know about, although that isn't a public server. It has a small army of DBAs and developers, but it has run for about ten months without a minute of downtime so I'd say that it is "field tested" at the very least.

-PatP|||http://www.entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=6032|||BIG BLUE

According to Winter Corp., the largest OLTP production database is an IBM DB2 cluster system run by Land Registry. That mainframe-based system is 18.3 terabytes.