Insufficient disk space on database servers was the cause of Toyota car production grinding to a halt for 36 hours at 14 plants in Japan late in August. But just how does such a situation arise?

Most database implementations are anything but static. Once deployed, databases are queried, updated, loaded, unloaded, reorganized, and data is deleted and inserted from them on an ongoing basis.

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Chief Analyst & CEO, NAND Research. Oracle and Amazon Web Services jointly announced the launch of Oracle Database@AWS. The new ...