Some pedantry... Raw RAM space is not the issue... it's indexing and structure of the data that makes it process-able. If you just need to spin through the da

Some pedantry... Raw RAM space is not the issue... it's indexing and structure of the data that makes it process-able. If you just need to spin through the data once, there's no need to even put all of it in RAM - just stream it off disk and process it sequentially. If you need to join the data, filter, index, query it, you'll need a lot more RAM than your actual data. Database engines have their own overhead (system tables, query processors, query parameter caches, etc.) And, this all assumes read-only. If you want to update that data, you'll need even more for extents, temp tables, index update operations, etc.