I always embarass myself when I do math in public, but anyway....
2,147,483,647 bytes is roughly 2.1 billion characters. According to one website I found (not linked because it seems to be rather political) there are 6.3 billion people in the world in 2004. That's as if one third of the population of the entire world had typed a single character on EN World.
2,147,483,647 bytes is roughly 2 gigabytes. That's a *lot* of conversation. Even if we're losing 20% to overhead stuff like message headers and indexes, that's still about 1.5 gigabytes of text. (And I know nothing about databases, so the 20% was just a number I grabbed because it's nice and round.)
Since a byte equals a character, assuming 7 bytes per word (to allow for spaces, punctuation, VB code, and the like), that's almost 307 million words (not accounting for database overhead).
Anyone know what 307 million words is equivalent to in printed terms? I'm certain it's way more than a paperback novel, and probably more than the collected works of Shakespeare, but is it closer to a set of encylopedias, the legal code for a small metropolis, the entire fiction section at the Library of Congress, or even more than that?