State of Data #56
July 8, 2011
#architecture – Facebook has a “serious MySQL problem”?
“1,800 servers dedicated to MySQL and 805 servers dedicated to memcached
…it has so much user data, and because every user clicking “Like,” updating his status, joining a new group or otherwise interacting with the site constitutes a transaction its MySQL database has to process. Every second a user has to wait while a Facebook service calls the database is time that user might spend wondering if it’s worth the wait.”
#big_data – Patriot Act vs. Data Protection Acts in Europe – what happens when they conflict – very pertinent for that ‘cloud’ thing
#conference – Another TDWI Summit – “Deep Analytics for Big Data”, San Diego, Sept 25-27
#competition – WikiMedia announces ‘a data modeling competition to develop an algorithm that predicts future editing activity on Wikipedia’
#DBMS – Counter Intuitive Fact #2 – A good hardware upgrade could kill the performance of your application. “Daily WTF” analyzes one of the many “whys” —
“Prior to the upgrade, at Wal*Mart waddling speed, the application trickled through the database table, and that meant very little happened in any given second. But after the upgrade, a number of order lines processed quickly, and suddenly the fact that some orders had the same item on two lines meant that the transaction exploded. Roughly 50% of the time that an order had duplicate lines, it now failed.”
#visualization – Real Estate Data viz. from Trulia. ‘When does crime happen in big cities’. San Francisco, beware of 9PM!
Skyscraper of Mobile Phone Call Data – Data or Abstract Art? (from New York Times)
#etc
- Twitter acquires BackType for Social Analytics
- Nordstrom Rack – the only winner in Groupon war? This amazing data visualization from Harvard Business Review shows so.
- #math – Celebrate a truly odd day this Saturday. Next one is on 9-11-13
- Data Analysis could lead to Meatless Mondays? – “83% of the average U.S. household’s carbon footprint for food comes from growing and producing it. Transportation is only 11%” “one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products.. achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food”