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Web Analytics Databases Get Even Larger
CurtMonash writes "Web analytics databases are getting even larger. eBay now has a 6 1/2 petabyte warehouse running on Greenplum — user data — to go with its more established 2 1/2 petabyte Teradata system. Between the two databases, the metrics are enormous — 17 trillion rows, 150 billion new rows per day, millions of queries per day, and so on. Meanwhile, Facebook has 2 1/2 petabytes managed by Hadoop, not running on a conventional DBMS at all, Yahoo has over a petabyte (on a homegrown system), and Fox/MySpace has two different multi-hundred terabyte systems (Greenplum and Aster Data nCluster). eBay and Fox are the two Greenplum customers I wrote in about last August, when they both seemed to be headed to the petabyte range in a hurry. These are basically all web log/clickstream databases, except that network event data is even more voluminous than the pure clickstream stuff."
At least these won't get out in the open that easily because someone copied them to an USB drive and lost it somewhere.
Yesy. It mighty take a whiley to get used to, but I thinky it's quite a plusy overall.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
...since that's that database on which Greenplum is based. PostgreSQL 8.4 is coming out soon and looks like it's got a lot of improvements. Too bad replication didn't make it in... hopefully in 8.5.
One of the improvements that looks good is the parallelized restore; RubyForge's upgrade from PostgreSQL 8.2 to 8.3 took 30 minutes to restore the db and it seems like this feature will speed that up considerably.
The Army reading list
These little puppies, i.e. recursive queries, look pretty cool too. Sounds like a good tool for threaded comment systems or finding related items in a table:
Recursive queries are typically used to deal with hierarchical or tree-structured data. A useful example is this query to find all the direct and indirect sub-parts of a product, given only a table that shows immediate inclusions:
WITH RECURSIVE included_parts(sub_part, part, quantity) AS (
SELECT sub_part, part, quantity FROM parts WHERE part = 'our_product'
UNION ALL
SELECT p.sub_part, p.part, p.quantity
FROM included_parts pr, parts p
WHERE p.part = pr.sub_part
)
SELECT sub_part, SUM(quantity) as total_quantity
FROM included_parts
GROUP BY sub_part
They'll get replication some day soon. But there is a lot of cool, very useful stuff with every new release. I usually feel like kid in a candy store wondering what's new that I can exploit.
With all that user data, you'd think they would know me better by now. But I still get these lame recommendations.
"You might be interested in action DVDs because you bought one in the past" - BRILLIANT!!