
Bottling the Magic Behind Google and Facebook - peter123
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/bottling-the-magic-behind-google-and-facebook/
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mdasen
So, as a business model, I get this feeling that it won't fly. Hadoop is a
great tool _if_ you need to deal with data at the level that a top 50 site
would need to. But at that point, wouldn't you be able to hire someone full-
time with a six-figure salary? Consulting tends to work better for firms that
can't afford to hire someone as staff - and those firms tend not to be of he
size that would need such a scalable data architecture.

Heck, even sites like Flickr (39th most trafficked), Wikipedia (7th),
Wordpress.com (36th), and Craigslist (47th) are still able to run off MySQL.
It just seems like businesses of that size would want staff and smaller
businesses wouldn't have the data to justify it.

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boorad
I can only guess how they're going to do, business model-wise, but big data
doesn't necessarily mean big companies or web properties as you suggest. Small
startups can do compelling things if they make sense out of big data. It's a
tedious and often impossible job now for just about everyone. Companies
displaying competence will do quite well for at least the beginning phase of
this movement, and have customers both big and small.

My gut says that it will become commonplace to need to handle tera or
petabyte-sized data. 640K turned out to be a wee bit shy of our memory needs.
Traditional RDBMS's will turn out to be a wee bit shy of our analysis needs.

