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Big data is dead

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Re: Big data is dead

#61
post #36

"For more than a decade now, the fact that people have a hard time gaining actionable insights from their data has been blamed on its size." The real issue is that business people usually ignore what the data says. Wading through data takes a huge amount of thought, which is in short supply. Data Scientists are commonly disregarded by VPs in large corporations, despite the claims about being "data driven". Most corpo…

I used to joke that Data Scientists exist not to uncover insights or provide analysis, but merely to provide factoids that confirm senior management's prior beliefs. I did several experiments, and noticed that whenever I produced analysis that was in line with what management expected - my analysis was praised and widely disseminated. Nobody would even question data completeness, quality, whatever. They would pick so…

"Data launderer" would be a good job title...

Re: Big data is dead

#62
post #6

I agree with many of the points here. My cheap no-name old laptop SSD writes with 170MB/s. A customer has a name, address, email and order. Let's say 200 bytes for each. That means I can write 844000 new customers per second, far outside my personal marketing reach. My disk is 240GB, which means I can store data for 1.2 billion customers. It'll take a while until I become that successful.

Presumably the "order" you mention is a primary key to another table, likely one that references the individual items that make up that order, so the data will be much larger than you estimate. It will grow larger still if you include web logs from your e-commerce site and event data from your mobile app so that you can correlate these orders with items that customers considered but ultimately didn't buy. How will yo…

There are functionally less than 1000 organizations that currently require distributed compute for data analysis. You can get off the shelf AWS units with 1000 cores, terabytes of ram and storage, etc. The cost of compute has decreased faster than the amount of data we have to store and process. What we used to do with spark jobs we can do with python on a single box.

Re: Big data is dead

#63
We're going to reach a point where we might say the same thing about large language models. Fine tuned LMs (based off of their large parents) are going to be the bread and butter.

Re: Big data is dead

#64

I've made anecdotal observations similiar to this over the last 10 years. I work in AgTech. A big push for a while here has been "more and more more data". Sensor-the-heck out of your farm, and We'll Tell You Things(tm). Most of what we as an industry are able to tell growers is stuff they already know or suspect. There is the occasional suprise or "Aha" moment where some correlation becomes apparent, but the thing a…

Most of the time this story is true, but think this way, the person that was using the system was an expert on the subject. If you can replace the expert with a person just looking at a graph from time to time to know if you have to irrigate the soils it's a different thing. Most of the data or ML tools show us something that the client as an expert already knows, but the true power of this tools is to give them to a non expert user and have roughly the same level of proficiency

Re: Big data is dead

#65
post #6

I agree with many of the points here. My cheap no-name old laptop SSD writes with 170MB/s. A customer has a name, address, email and order. Let's say 200 bytes for each. That means I can write 844000 new customers per second, far outside my personal marketing reach. My disk is 240GB, which means I can store data for 1.2 billion customers. It'll take a while until I become that successful.

Presumably the "order" you mention is a primary key to another table, likely one that references the individual items that make up that order, so the data will be much larger than you estimate. It will grow larger still if you include web logs from your e-commerce site and event data from your mobile app so that you can correlate these orders with items that customers considered but ultimately didn't buy. How will yo…

Don't forget the cool JS library you included to track mouse movements so you can optimize your UI to make sure Important Money Making Things are easily clickable.

That's 8.4 hojillion megabytes per second right there.

Re: Big data is dead

#66
post #36

"For more than a decade now, the fact that people have a hard time gaining actionable insights from their data has been blamed on its size." The real issue is that business people usually ignore what the data says. Wading through data takes a huge amount of thought, which is in short supply. Data Scientists are commonly disregarded by VPs in large corporations, despite the claims about being "data driven". Most corpo…

I used to joke that Data Scientists exist not to uncover insights or provide analysis, but merely to provide factoids that confirm senior management's prior beliefs. I did several experiments, and noticed that whenever I produced analysis that was in line with what management expected - my analysis was praised and widely disseminated. Nobody would even question data completeness, quality, whatever. They would pick so…

This would match what psychologists say about humans in general: we feel first, then we use our brain to justify that feeling. We’re not rational beings.

Re: Big data is dead

#67
post #36

"For more than a decade now, the fact that people have a hard time gaining actionable insights from their data has been blamed on its size." The real issue is that business people usually ignore what the data says. Wading through data takes a huge amount of thought, which is in short supply. Data Scientists are commonly disregarded by VPs in large corporations, despite the claims about being "data driven". Most corpo…

I used to joke that Data Scientists exist not to uncover insights or provide analysis, but merely to provide factoids that confirm senior management's prior beliefs. I did several experiments, and noticed that whenever I produced analysis that was in line with what management expected - my analysis was praised and widely disseminated. Nobody would even question data completeness, quality, whatever. They would pick so…

Huh. I've not thought of it as laundering, but I think you've basically summarised consulting in healthcare. Pay to legitimize and push through a pre-existing idea (eg let's close down a few ERs) or a delusion (e.g. lean, we don't need a waiting room) and say it was recommended by consultants to stakeholders and the public.

Re: Big data is dead

#68
post #35

I see it all the time: people develop applications that will never ever get a database size of over 100GB and are using big data databases or distributed cloud databases. Often queries only hit a small subset of the date (one customer, one user). So you could easily fit everything into one SQL database. Using any of the traditional SQL databases takes away a lot of complications. You can do transactions, you can quer…

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Re: Big data is dead

#69
post #67
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to joke that Data Scientists exist not to uncover insights or provide analysis, but merely to provide factoids that confirm senior management's prior beliefs. I did several experiments, and noticed that whenever I produced analysis that was in line with what management expected - my analysis was praised and widely disseminated. Nobody would even question data completeness, quality, whatever. They would pick so…

Huh. I've not thought of it as laundering, but I think you've basically summarised consulting in healthcare. Pay to legitimize and push through a pre-existing idea (eg let's close down a few ERs) or a delusion (e.g. lean, we don't need a waiting room) and say it was recommended by consultants to stakeholders and the public.

Right, the more appropriate analogy is "parallel construction"...

Re: Big data is dead

#70
post #35

I see it all the time: people develop applications that will never ever get a database size of over 100GB and are using big data databases or distributed cloud databases. Often queries only hit a small subset of the date (one customer, one user). So you could easily fit everything into one SQL database. Using any of the traditional SQL databases takes away a lot of complications. You can do transactions, you can quer…

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