"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…
Big data is dead
61–70 of 444 posts
Re: Big data is dead
#62I 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…
Re: Big data is dead
#63Re: Big data is dead
#64I'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…
Re: Big data is dead
#65I 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…
That's 8.4 hojillion megabytes per second right there.
Re: Big data is dead
#66"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…
Re: Big data is dead
#67"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…
Re: Big data is dead
#68I 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…
Re: Big data is dead
#69Earlier 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.
Re: Big data is dead
#70I 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…