[keefe]

you've actually got the processing power to do interesting things. I've currently got a 250M record database in my domain of interest - a few years ago, crunching on this database was prohibitively time expensive but now it flies, without even getting into what it means to be able to run stuff on EC2 with arbitrary power... that's direct experience with the same database btw, not supposition based on two different databases. Next, consider how much more data is being generated... it should not be difficult to believe that drawing interesting conclusions from data is and will continue to be interesting.