In a recent discussion with an engineer from Facebook regarding the time value of data, it was continuously emphasized that the relevance of “hot” data vastly outweighed the importance of “cold” data when considering the daily/weekly/monthly monetization of their business. In order to exploit the hot data, complex data processing factories were created to facilitate the “conditioning” of raw JSON and structured data in order to ingest it into Scuba… a system they developed for doing real-time, ad-hoc analysis of arbitrary datasets. While this is not a new story by any means, enterprise companies and government organizations may be surprised to hear that over 50% of Facebook engineers now leverage Scuba’s real-time capabilities for decision making.
Data fusion is generally defined as the process of synthesizing raw data from several sources to generate more meaningful information that can be of greater value than single sourced data. For over 20 years enterprises have struggled to migrate from stove-piped legacy database applications to centralized data warehouses in the hope that through consolidation they would achieve cost savings and greater access to their data. But as long as SQL processing was trapped in “the box,” enterprises would always be at the performance mercy of single box solutions. The only people that benefited from this approach were the large institutional database purveyors.
As the market is quickly finding out, SingleStore solved this longstanding and painful performance bottleneck through the introduction of its distributed in-memory scale-out cluster computing model predicated on cost effective commodity servers. When combined and powered by a massively parallel and distributed query optimizer, the SingleStore solution effectively allows SQL to escape “the box” by leveraging hundreds or thousands of computing cores for each and every in-memory database transaction. This innovation was the first step on a journey to unleash the power of your data enabling true real-time analytics.
WebOps/DevOps based companies like Facebook have developed in-house solutions to provide real-time data fusion in order to take advantage of Hot data. Facebook has half the number of employees as Yahoo and one-tenth the number of employees of Google. Could enabling real-time ad-hoc analytics be part of their growing competitive advantage and profitability within their market? The good news is that SingleStore has commercialized an enterprise ready capability that can help your organization quickly find out. Waiting Sucks! Call SingleStore.
