Out of interest, what circles are you moving in? Are people filling their databses with videos or something?
I'm sure I just lack the imagination, but i cant imagine how there can be thwt many companies who can make TB of data they then want to shove in a database. The complete sales history of even a medium sized company should still easily fit in a GB or two.
If you decide you dont want to throw anything away forever you can grow pretty fast :)
Some of the huge ones absolutely do binary storage for HA/DR reasons, but payroll companies and realestate companies are the mainstay and they have a tendency to store a lot of XML crap on top of the lovely normalized rows.
I'm sure I just lack the imagination, but i cant imagine how there can be thwt many companies who can make TB of data they then want to shove in a database. The complete sales history of even a medium sized company should still easily fit in a GB or two.