Data types
Analysis of data management technology optimized for specific datatypes, such as text, geospatial, object, RDF, or XML. Related subjects include:
- Any subcategory
- Database diversity
The Hemisphere program
Another surveillance slide deck has emerged, as reported by the New York Times and other media outlets. This one is for the Hemisphere program, which apparently:
- Stores CDRs (Call Detail Records), many or all of which are collected via …
- … some kind of back door into the AT&T switches that many carriers use. (See Slide 2.)
- Has also included “subscriber information” for AT&T phones since July, 2012.
- Contains “long distance and international” CDRs back to 1987.
- Currently adds 4 billion CDRs per day.
- Is administered by a Federal drug-related law enforcement agency but …
- … is used to combat many non-drug-related crimes as well. (See Slides 21-26.)
Other notes include:
- The agencies specifically mentioned on Slide 16 as making numerous Hemisphere requests are the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and DHS (Department of Homeland Security).
- “Roaming” data giving city/state is mentioned in the deck, but more precise geo-targeting is not.
I’ve never gotten a single consistent figure, but typical CDR size seems to be in the 100s of bytes range. So I conjecture that Project Hemisphere spawned one of the first petabyte-scale databases ever.
Hemisphere Project unknowns start: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Petabyte-scale data management, Specific users, Surveillance and privacy, Telecommunications | Leave a Comment |
Cloudera Hadoop strategy and usage notes
When we scheduled a call to talk about Sentry, Cloudera’s Charles Zedlewski and I found time to discuss other stuff as well. One interesting part of our discussion was around the processing “frameworks” Cloudera sees as most important.
- The four biggies are:
- MapReduce. Duh.
- SQL, specifically Impala. This is as opposed to the uneasy Hive/MapReduce layering.
- Search.
- “Math” , which seems to mainly be through partnerships with SAS and Revolution Analytics. I don’t know a lot about how these work, but I presume they bypass MapReduce, in which case I could imagine them greatly outperforming Mahout.
- Stream processing (Storm) is next in line.
- Graph — e.g. Giraph — rises to at least the proof-of-concept level. Again, the hope would be that this well outperforms graph-on-MapReduce.
- Charles is also seeing at least POC interest in Spark.
- But MPI (Message Passing Interface) on Hadoop isn’t going anywhere fast, except to the extent it’s baked into SAS or other “math” frameworks. Generic MPI use cases evidently turn out to be a bad fit for Hadoop, due to factors such as:
- Low data volumes.
- Latencies in various parts of the system
HBase was artificially omitted from this “frameworks” discussion because Cloudera sees it as a little bit more of a “storage” system than a processing one.
Another good subject was offloading work to Hadoop, in a couple different senses of “offload”: Read more
Hortonworks business notes
Hortonworks did a business-oriented round of outreach, talking with at least Derrick Harris and me. Notes from my call — for which Rob Bearden didn’t bother showing up — include, in no particular order:
- Hortonworks denies advanced acquisition discussions with either Microsoft and Intel. Of course, that doesn’t exactly contradict the widespread story of Intel having made an acquisition offer. Edit: I have subsequently heard, very credibly, that the denial was untrue.
- As vendors usually do, Hortonworks denies the extreme forms of Cloudera’s suggestion that Hortonworks competitive wins relate to price slashing. But Hortonworks does believe that its license fees often wind up being lower than Cloudera’s, due especially to Hortonworks offering few extra-charge items than Cloudera.
- Hortonworks used a figure of ~75 subscription customers. Edit: That figure turns out in retrospect to have been inflated. This does not include OEM sales through, for example, Teradata, Microsoft Azure, or Rackspace. However, that does include …
- … a small number of installations hosted in the cloud — e.g. ~2 on Amazon Web Services — or otherwise remotely. Also, testing in the cloud seems to be fairly frequent, and the cloud can also be a source of data ingested into Hadoop.
- Since Hortonworks a couple of times made it seem that Rackspace was an important partner, behind only Teradata and Microsoft, I finally asked why. Answers boiled down to a Rackspace Hadoop-as-a-service offering, plus joint work to improve Hadoop-on-OpenStack.
- Other Hortonworks reseller partners seem more important in terms of helping customers consume HDP (Hortonworks Data Platform), rather than for actually doing Hortonworks’ selling for it. (This is unsurprising — channel sales rarely are a path to success for a product that is also appropriately sold by a direct force.)
- Hortonworks listed its major industry sectors as:
- Web and retailing, which it identifies as one thing.
- Media.
- Telecommunications.
- Health care (various subsectors).
- Financial services, which it called “competitive” in the kind of tone that usually signifies “we lose a lot more than we win, and would love to change that”.
In Hortonworks’ view, Hadoop adopters typically start with a specific use case around a new type of data, such as clickstream, sensor, server log, geolocation, or social. Read more
Data model churn
Perhaps we should remind ourselves of the many ways data models can be caused to churn. Here are some examples that are top-of-mind for me. They do overlap a lot — and the whole discussion overlaps with my post about schema complexity last January, and more generally with what I’ve written about dynamic schemas for the past several years..
Just to confuse things further — some of these examples show the importance of RDBMS, while others highlight the relational model’s limitations.
The old standbys
Product and service changes. Simple changes to your product line many not require any changes to the databases recording their production and sale. More complex product changes, however, probably will.
A big help in MCI’s rise in the 1980s was its new Friends and Family service offering. AT&T couldn’t respond quickly, because it couldn’t get the programming done, where by “programming” I mainly mean database integration and design. If all that was before your time, this link seems like a fairly contemporaneous case study.
Organizational changes. A common source of hassle, especially around databases that support business intelligence or planning/budgeting, is organizational change. Kalido’s whole business was based on accommodating that, last I checked, as were a lot of BI consultants’. Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Derived data, Kalido, Log analysis, Software as a Service (SaaS), Specific users, Text, Web analytics | 3 Comments |
How is the surveillance data used?
Over the past week, discussion has exploded about US government surveillance. After summarizing, as best I could, what data the government appears to collect, now I ‘d like to consider what they actually do with it. More precisely, I’d like to focus on the data’s use(s) in combating US-soil terrorism. In a nutshell:
- Reporting is persuasive that electronic surveillance data is helpful in following up on leads and tips obtained by other means.
- Reporting is not persuasive that electronic surveillance data on its own uncovers or averts many terrorist plots.
- With limited exceptions, neither evidence nor logic suggests that data mining or predictive modeling does much to prevent domestic terrorist attacks.
Consider the example of Tamerlan Tsarnaev:
In response to this 2011 request, the FBI checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history.
While that response was unsuccessful in preventing a dramatic act of terrorism, at least they tried.
As for actual success stories — well, that’s a bit tough. In general, there are few known examples of terrorist plots being disrupted by law enforcement in the United States, except for fake plots engineered to draw terrorist-leaning individuals into committing actual crimes. One of those examples, that of Najibullah Zazi, was indeed based on an intercepted email — but the email address itself was uncovered through more ordinary anti-terrorism efforts.
As for machine learning/data mining/predictive modeling, I’ve never seen much of a hint of it being used in anti-terrorism efforts, whether in the news or in my own discussions inside the tech industry. And I think there’s a great reason for that — what would they use for a training set? Here’s what I mean. Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, RDF and graphs, Surveillance and privacy, Text | 9 Comments |
Where things stand in US government surveillance
Edit: Please see the comment thread below for updates. Please also see a follow-on post about how the surveillance data is actually used.
US government surveillance has exploded into public consciousness since last Thursday. With one major exception, the news has just confirmed what was already thought or known. So where do we stand?
My views about domestic data collection start:
- I’ve long believed that the Feds — specifically the NSA (National Security Agency) — are storing metadata/traffic data on every telephone call and email in the US. The recent news, for example Senator Feinstein’s responses to the Verizon disclosure, just confirms it. That the Feds sometimes claim this has to be “foreign” data or they won’t look at it hardly undermines my opinion.
- Even private enterprises can more or less straightforwardly buy information about every credit card purchase we make. So of course the Feds can get that as well, as the Wall Street Journal seems to have noticed. More generally, I’d assume the Feds have all the financial data they want, via the IRS if nothing else.
- Similarly, many kinds of social media postings are aggregated for anybody to purchase, or can be scraped by anybody who invests in the equipment and bandwidth. Attensity’s service is just one example.
- I’m guessing that web use data (http requests, search terms, etc.) is not yet routinely harvested by the US government.* Ditto deanonymization of same. I guess that way basically because I’ve heard few rumblings to the contrary. Further, the consumer psychographic profiles that are so valuable to online retailers might be of little help to national security analysts anyway.
- Video surveillance seems likely to grow, from fixed cameras perhaps to drones; note for example the various officials who called for more public cameras after that Boston Marathon bombing. But for the present discussion, that’s of lesser concern to me, simply because it’s done less secretively than other kinds of surveillance. If there’s a camera that can see us, often we can see it too.
*Recall that these comments are US-specific. Data retention legislation has been proposed or passed in multiple countries to require recording of, among other things, all URL requests, with the stated goal of fighting either digital piracy or child pornography.
As for foreign data: Read more
| Categories: Hadoop, HP and Neoview, Petabyte-scale data management, Pricing, Surveillance and privacy, Telecommunications, Text, Vertica Systems, Web analytics | 10 Comments |
Some stuff I’m working on
1. I have some posts up on Strategic Messaging. The most recent are overviews of messaging, pricing, and positioning.
2. Numerous vendors are blending SQL and JSON management in their short-request DBMS. It will take some more work for me to have a strong opinion about the merits/demerits of various alternatives.
The default implementation — one example would be Clustrix’s — is to stick the JSON into something like a BLOB/CLOB field (Binary/Character Large Object), index on individual values, and treat those indexes just like any others for the purpose of SQL statements. Drawbacks include:
- You have to store or retrieve the JSON in whole documents at a time.
- If you are spectacularly careless, you could write JOINs with odd results.
IBM DB2 is one recent arrival to the JSON party. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask whether IBM’s JSON implementation was based on IBM DB2 pureXML when I had the chance, and IBM hasn’t gotten around to answering my followup query.
3. Nor has IBM gotten around to answering my followup queries on the subject of BLU, an interesting-sounding columnar option for DB2.
4. Numerous clients have asked me whether they should be active in DBaaS (DataBase as a Service). After all, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace and salesforce.com are all in that business in some form, and other big companies have dipped toes in as well. Read more
Analytic application themes
I talk with a lot of companies, and repeatedly hear some of the same application themes. This post is my attempt to collect some of those ideas in one place.
1. So far, the buzzword of the year is “real-time analytics”, generally with “operational” or “big data” included as well. I hear variants of that positioning from NewSQL vendors (e.g. MemSQL), NoSQL vendors (e.g. AeroSpike), BI stack vendors (e.g. Platfora), application-stack vendors (e.g. WibiData), log analysis vendors (led by Splunk), data management vendors (e.g. Cloudera), and of course the CEP industry.
Yeah, yeah, I know — not all the named companies are in exactly the right market category. But that’s hard to avoid.
Why this gold rush? On the demand side, there’s a real or imagined need for speed. On the supply side, I’d say:
- There are vast numbers of companies offering data-management-related technology. They need ways to differentiate.
- Doing analytics at short-request speeds is an obvious data-management-related challenge, and not yet comprehensively addressed.
2. More generally, most of the applications I hear about are analytic, or have a strong analytic aspect. The three biggest areas — and these overlap — are:
- Customer interaction
- Network and sensor monitoring
- Game and mobile application back-ends
Also arising fairly frequently are:
- Algorithmic trading
- Anti-fraud
- Risk measurement
- Law enforcement/national security
- Healthcare
- Stakeholder-facing analytics
I’m hearing less about quality, defect tracking, and equipment maintenance than I used to, but those application areas have anyway been ebbing and flowing for decades.
DBMS development and other subjects
The cardinal rules of DBMS development
Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of dollars.
That’s if things go extremely well.
Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1.
In particular:
- Concurrent workloads benchmarked in the lab are poor predictors of concurrent performance in real life.
- Mixed workload management is harder than you’re assuming it is.
- Those minor edge cases in which your Version 1 product works poorly aren’t minor after all.
DBMS with Hadoop underpinnings …
… aren’t exceptions to the cardinal rules of DBMS development. That applies to Impala (Cloudera), Stinger (Hortonworks), and Hadapt, among others. Fortunately, the relevant vendors seem to be well aware of this fact. Read more
One database to rule them all?
Perhaps the single toughest question in all database technology is: Which different purposes can a single data store serve well? — or to phrase it more technically — Which different usage patterns can a single data store support efficiently? Ted Codd was on multiple sides of that issue, first suggesting that relational DBMS could do everything and then averring they could not. Mike Stonebraker too has been on multiple sides, first introducing universal DBMS attempts with Postgres and Illustra/Informix, then more recently suggesting the world needs 9 or so kinds of database technology. As for me — well, I agreed with Mike both times. 🙂
Since this is MUCH too big a subject for a single blog post, what I’ll do in this one is simply race through some background material. To a first approximation, this whole discussion is mainly about data layouts — but only if we interpret that concept broadly enough to comprise:
- Every level of storage (disk, RAM, etc.).
- Indexes, aggregates and raw data alike.
To date, nobody has ever discovered a data layout that is efficient for all usage patterns. As a general rule, simpler data layouts are often faster to write, while fancier ones can boost query performance. Specific tradeoffs include, but hardly are limited to: Read more