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Big data is dead (2023)

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Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make a ZFS or BCacheFS pool with 20-30% redundancy bits and just go wild with CLI programs Lol. Data management is about safety, auditablity, access control, knowledge sharing and who bunch of other stuff. I would've immediately shown you the door as someone who i cannot trust data with.

I already qualified my statement quite well by stating my background but if it makes you feel better then sure, show me the door. :) I was never a data scientist, just a guy who helped whenever it was necessary.

> I already qualified my statement quite well by stating my background

No. You qualified it with "blows my mind" . Why would it 'blow your mind' if you don't have any data background.

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#202
post #185
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.parquet files are completely underrated, many people still do not know about the format! .parquet preserves data types (unlike CSV) They are 10x smaller than CSV. So 600GB instead of 6TB. They are 50x faster to read than CSV They are an "open standard" from Apache Foundation Of course, you can't peek inside them as easily as you can a CSV. But, the tradeoffs are worth it! Please promote the use of .parquet files! Ma…

Why is .parquet better than protobuf?

Parquet is columnar storage, which is much faster for querying. And typically for protobuf you deserialize each row, which has a performance cost - you need to deserialize the whole message, and can't get just the field you want.

So, of you want to query a giant collection of protobufs, you end up reading and deserializing every record. For parquet, you get much closer to only reading what you need.

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#203
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A moderately powerful desktop processor has memory bandwidth of over 50TB/s so yeah it'll take a couple of minutes sure.

The slow part of using awk is waiting for the disk to spin over the magnetic head. And most laptops have 4 CPU cores these days, and a multiprocess operating system, so you don’t have to wait for random access on a spinning plate to find every bit in order, you can simply have multiple awk commands running in parallel. Awk is most certainly a better user interface than whatever custom BrandQL you have to use in a tex…

> The slow part of using awk is waiting for the disk to spin over the magnetic head.

If we're talking about 6 TB of data:

- You can upgrade to 8 TB of storage on a 16-inch MacBook Pro for $2,200, and the lowest spec has 12 CPU cores. With up to 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth, it's truly a case of "your big data problem easily fits on my laptop".

- Contemporary motherboards have 4 to 5 M.2 slots, so you could today build a 12 TB RAID 5 setup of 4 TB Samsung 990 PRO NVMe drives for ~ 4 x $326 = $1,304. Probably in a year or two there will be 8 TB NVMe's readily available.

Flash memory is cheap in 2024!

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#204
post #188
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.parquet files are completely underrated, many people still do not know about the format! .parquet preserves data types (unlike CSV) They are 10x smaller than CSV. So 600GB instead of 6TB. They are 50x faster to read than CSV They are an "open standard" from Apache Foundation Of course, you can't peek inside them as easily as you can a CSV. But, the tradeoffs are worth it! Please promote the use of .parquet files! Ma…

Parquet is underdesigned. Some parts of it do not scale well. I believe that Parquet files have rather monolithic metadata at the end and it has 4G max size limit. 600 columns (it is realistic, believe me), and we are at slightly less than 7.2 millions row groups. Give each row group 8K rows and we are limited to 60 billion rows total. It is not much. The flatness of the file metadata require external data structures…

Nobody is forcing you to use a single Parquet file.

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make a ZFS or BCacheFS pool with 20-30% redundancy bits and just go wild with CLI programs Lol. Data management is about safety, auditablity, access control, knowledge sharing and who bunch of other stuff. I would've immediately shown you the door as someone who i cannot trust data with.

> Lol. Data management is about safety, auditablity, access control, knowledge sharing and who bunch of other stuff. I would've immediately shown you the door as someone who i cannot trust data with. No need to act smug and superior, especially since nothing about OP's plan here actually precludes having all the nice things you mentioned, or even having them inside $your_favorite_enterprise_environment. You risk comi…

> No need to act smug and superior

I responded with the same tone that gp responded with. "blows my mind" ( that people can be so stupid) .

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#206
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make a ZFS or BCacheFS pool with 20-30% redundancy bits and just go wild with CLI programs Lol. Data management is about safety, auditablity, access control, knowledge sharing and who bunch of other stuff. I would've immediately shown you the door as someone who i cannot trust data with.

What about his answer prevents any of that? As stated the question didn't require any of what you outline here. ZFS will probably do a better job of protecting your data than almost any other filesystem out there so it's not a bad foundation to start with if you want to protect data. Your entire post reeks of "I'm smarter than you" smugness while at the same time revealing no useful information or approaches. Near as…

> Your entire post reeks of "I'm smarter than you"

unlike "blows my mind" ?

> As stated the question didn't require any of what you outline here.

Right. OP mentioned it was "tricky question" . What makes it tricky is that all those attributes are implicitly assumed. I wouldn't interview at google and tell them my "stack" is "load it on your laptop". I would never say that in an interview even if I think that's the right "stack" .

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#207
post #32

When I was hiring data scientists for a previous job, my favorite tricky question was "what stack/architecture would you build" with the somewhat detailed requirements of "6 TiB of data" in sight. I was careful not to require overly complicated sums, I simply said it's MAX 6TiB I patiently listened to all the big query hadoop habla-blabla, even asked questions about the financials (hardware/software/license BOM) and…

[deleted]

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#208
post #188
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.parquet files are completely underrated, many people still do not know about the format! .parquet preserves data types (unlike CSV) They are 10x smaller than CSV. So 600GB instead of 6TB. They are 50x faster to read than CSV They are an "open standard" from Apache Foundation Of course, you can't peek inside them as easily as you can a CSV. But, the tradeoffs are worth it! Please promote the use of .parquet files! Ma…

Parquet is underdesigned. Some parts of it do not scale well. I believe that Parquet files have rather monolithic metadata at the end and it has 4G max size limit. 600 columns (it is realistic, believe me), and we are at slightly less than 7.2 millions row groups. Give each row group 8K rows and we are limited to 60 billion rows total. It is not much. The flatness of the file metadata require external data structures…

some critiques of parquet by andy pavlo

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol17/p148-zeng.pdf

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#209
post #186
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that may have an impact on the answers: you are hiring them, so I assume they are passing a technical interview. So they expect that you want to check their understanding of the technical stack. I would not conclude that they over-engineer everything they do from such an answer, but rather just that they got tricked in this very artificial situation where you are in a dominant position and ask trick questio…

From the point of view of the interviewee, it's impossible to guess if they expect you to answer "no need for big data" or if they expect you to answer "the company is aiming for exponential growth so disregard the 6TB limit and architect for scalability"

FWIW, it's a 2.5 second extra to say "Although you don't need big data, but if you insist, ..." and gimme the hadoop answer.

Re: Big data is dead (2023)

#210
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since the data scientist cannot verify the very complex AWK output that should be 100% compatible with his SQL query, he relies on the GPT output for business-critical analysis.

Only if your testing frameworks are inadequate. But I belive you could be missing or mistaken on how code generation successfully integrates into a developer and data scientist's work flow. Why not take a few days to get familiar with AWK, a skill which will last a lifetime? Like SQL, it really isn't so bad.

It is easier to write complex queries in SQL instead of AWK. I know both AWK and SQL, and I find SQL much easier for complex data analysis, including JOINS, subqueries, window functions, etc. Of course, your mileage may vary, but I think most data scientists will be much more comfortable with SQL.
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