Just a thought I had. I used to program and administrate databases and am always interested, maybe a little obsessed, about such details. It’s been a while (almost twenty years), many posts and other things had to be stored. So can someone tell how big the data file for the database is in bytes (or is it a trade secret ;))?
I believe threads and posts are numbered sequentially, which would put us at roughly 21 million posts in a bit over 850,000 threads, going by the post and thread numbers of your post.
I imagine it’s really not that big, in the sense of you probably have somewhere on the order of 50 million records in total (about 22 million pointer records, and 21 million records containing post content, plus any additional tables that are in there)
As for size, I don’t know physically how big it might be; I always let the DBAs worry about that kind of thing! 
So it fits in a breadbox.
Words take very little “space”. Images and videos really add up, but they are not allowed, just links to other places that hold images and videos. It may not be as huge as you might imagine.
I know, I know, I’m in IT for 25 years, I don’t imagine it to be very big. But I was just interested in the actual size.
Hm. For a very rough guess, take those 21 million posts and guess an average length of 500 8-bit characters (because, why not that number) would give a database in the range of 10 GB uncompressed. So the real size is probably within a power of 2 or so of that number.
10GB, eh? So I could store the whole thing in my computer just in the extra space between the disks.
I have a 64 GB memory stick in my pocket.
Text takes up very very little space – 10 GB for the whole SDMB.
And you are walking around with the whole SDMB in your pocket because…
“Just research for this thread?” Tell it to the judge.
ETA: Charges withdrawn. Misread a hypothetical.
Although I, for one, wouldn’t even know how to actually do such a thing as put SDMB in my pocket (isn’t that cute?) or hide it from Zotti under a thimble.
What sort of fun modeling could you do with it? NLP to flag suspected socks comes to mind.
“NLP?”
A.I. - natural language processing
or are you happy to see [her]?
<snip>
[Mae West] Why don’t you come up and see me sometime, big boy? [/Mae West]
It’s longer than she thought.