## HLL talk at SFPUG

I had the pleasure of speaking at the SF PostgreSQL User Group’s meetup tonight about sketching, the history of HLL, and our implementation of HLL as a PG extension. My slides are embedded below and you can get a PDF copy here. Be sure to click the gear below to show speaker’s notes for context!

If video is made available, I’ll post an update with a link!

## Hitting the Books: EADS Summer School on Hashing

Rob, Matt, and I just wrapped up our trip to Copenhagen for the EADS Summer School on Hashing at the University of Copenhagen and it was a blast! The lineup of speakers was, simply put, unbeatable: Rasmus Pagh, Graham Cormode, Michael Mitzenmacher, Mikkel Thorup, Alex Andoni, Haim Kaplan, John Langford, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. There’s a good chance that any paper you’ve read on hashing, sketching, or streaming has one of them as a co-author or is heavily influenced by their work. The format was three hour-and-a-half lectures for four days, with exercises presented at the end of each lecture. (Slides can be found here. They might also post videos. UPDATE: They’ve posted videos!)

Despite the depth of the material, almost all of it was approachable with some experience in undergraduate math and computer science. We would strongly recommend both of Michael Mitzenmacher’s talks (1, 2) for an excellent overview of Bloom Filters and Cuckoo hashing that are, in my opinion, significantly better and more in depth than any other out there. Specifically, the Bloom Filter talk presents very elegantly the continuum of Bloom Filter to Counting Bloom Filter to Count-Min Sketch (with “conservative update”) to the Stragglers Problem and Invertible Bloom Filters to, finally, extremely recent work called Odd Sketches.

Similarly, Mikkel Thorup’s two talks on hashing (1, 2) do a very thorough job of examining the hows and whys of integer hashing, all the way from the simplest multiply-mod-prime schemes all the way to modern work on tabulation hashing. And if you haven’t heard of tabulation hashing, and specifically twisted tabulation hashing, get on that because (1) it’s amazing that it doesn’t produce trash given how simple it is, (2) it’s unbelievably fast, and (3) it has been proven to provide the guarantees required for almost all of the interesting topics we’ve discussed on the blog in the past: Bloom Filters, Count-Min sketch, HyperLogLog, chaining/linear-probing/cuckoo hash tables, and so on. We really appreciated how much attention Mikkel devoted to practicality of implementation and to empirical performance when discussing hashing algorithms. It warms our heart to hear a leading academic in this field tout the number of nanoseconds it takes to hash an item as vocally as the elegance of the proof behind it!

We love this “Summer School” format because it delivers the accumulated didactic insight of the field’s top researchers and educators to both old techniques and brand new ones. (And we hope by now that everyone reading our blog appreciates how obsessed we are with teaching and clarifying interesting algorithms and data structures!) Usually most of this insight (into origins, creative process, stumbling blocks, intermediate results, inspiration, etc.) only comes out in conversation or lectures, and even worse is withheld or elided at publishing time for the sake of “clarity” or “elegance”, which is a baffling rationale given how useful these “notes in the margin” have been to us. The longer format of the lectures really allowed for useful “digressions” into the history or inspiration for topics or proofs, which is a huge contrast to the 10-minute presentations given at a conference like SODA. (Yes, obviously the objective of SODA is to show a much greater breadth of work, but it really makes it hard to explain or digest the context of new work.)

In much the same way, the length of the program really gave us the opportunity to have great conversations with the speakers and attendees between sessions and over dinner. We can’t emphasize this enough: if your ambition to is implement and understand cutting edge algorithms and data structures then the best bang for your buck is to get out there and meet the researchers in person. We’re incredibly lucky to call most of the speakers our friends and to regularly trade notes and get pointers to new research. They have helped us time and again when we’ve been baffled by inconsistent terminology or had a hunch that two pieces of research were “basically saying the same thing”. Unsurprisingly, they are also the best group of people to talk to when it comes to understanding how to foster a culture of successful research. For instance, Mikkel has a great article on how to systematically encourage and reward research article that appears in the March 2013 issue of CACM (pay-wall’d). Also worthwhile is his guest post on Bertrand Meyer’s blog.

If Mikkel decides to host another one of these, we cannot recommend attending enough. (Did we mention it was free?!) Thanks again Mikkel, Rasmus, Graham, Alex, Michael, Haim, and John for organizing such a great program and lecturing so eloquently!

## HLL Intersections

### Why?

The intersection of two streams (of user ids) is a particularly important business need in the advertising industry. For instance, if you want to reach suburban moms but the cost of targeting those women on a particular inventory provider is too high, you might want to know about a cheaper inventory provider whose audience overlaps with the first provider. You may also want to know how heavily your car-purchaser audience overlaps with a certain metro area or a particular income range. These types of operations are critical for understanding where and how well you’re spending your advertising budget.

As we’ve seen before, HyperLogLog provides a time- and memory-efficient algorithm for estimating the number of distinct values in a stream. For the past two years, we’ve been using HLL at AK to do just that: count the number of unique users in a stream of ad impressions. Conveniently, HLL also supports the union operator ( $\cup$ ) allowing us to trivially estimate the distinct value count of any composition of streams without sacrificing precision or accuracy. This piqued our interest because if we can “losslessly” compute the union of two streams and produce low-error cardinality estimates, then there’s a chance we can use that estimate along with the inclusion-exclusion principle to produce “directionally correct” cardinality estimates of the intersection of two streams. (To be clear, when I say “directionally correct” my criteria is “can an advertiser make a decision off of this number?”, or “can it point them in the right direction for further research?”. This often means that we can tolerate relative errors of up to 50%.)

The goals were:

1. Get a grasp on the theoretical error bounds of intersections done with HLLs, and
2. Come up with heuristic bounds around $m$, $overlap$, and the set cardinalities that could inform our usage of HLL intersections in the AK product.

Quick terminology review:

• If I have set of integers $A$, I’m going to call the HLL representing it $H_{A}$.
• If I have HLLs $H_{A}, H_{B}$ and their union $H_{A \cup B}$, then I’m going to call the intersection cardinality estimate produced $|H_{A \cap B}|$.
• Define the $overlap$ between two sets as $overlap(A, B) := \frac{|A \cap B|}{min(|A|, |B|)}$.
• Define the cardinality ratio $\frac{max(|A|, |B|)}{min(|A|, |B|)}$ as a shorthand for the relative cardinality of the two sets.
• We’ll represent the absolute error of an observation $|H_{A}|$ as $\Delta |H_{A}|$.

That should be enough for those following our recent posts, but for those just jumping in, check out Appendices A and B at the bottom of the post for a more thorough review of the set terminology and error terminology.

### Experiment

We fixed 16 $overlap$ values (0.0001, 0.001, 0.01, 0.02, 0.05, 0.1, 0.15, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0) and 12 set cardinalities (100M, 50M, 10M, 5M, 1M, 500K, 100K, 50K, 10K, 5K, 1K, 300) and did 100 runs of each permutation of $(overlap, |A|, |B|)$. A random stream of 64-bit integers hashed with Murmur3 was used to create the two sets such that they shared exactly $min(|A|,|B|) \cdot overlap = |A \cap B|$  elements. We then built the corresponding HLLs $H_{A}$ and $H_{B}$ for those sets and calculated the intersection cardinality estimate $|H_{A} \cap H_{B}|$ and computed its relative error.

Given that we could only generate and insert about 2M elements/second per core, doing runs with set cardinalities greater than 100M was quickly ruled out for this blog post. However, I can assure you the results hold for much larger sets (up to the multiple billion-element range) as long as you heed the advice below.

### Results

This first group of plots has a lot going on, so I’ll preface it by saying that it’s just here to give you a general feeling for what’s going on. First note that within each group of boxplots $overlap$ increases from left to right (orange to green to pink), and within each plot cardinality ratio increases from left to right. Also note that the y-axis (the relative error of the observation) is log-base-10 scale. You can clearly see that as the set sizes diverge, the error skyrockets for all but the most similar (in both cardinality and composition) sets. I’ve drawn in a horizontal line at 50% relative error to make it easier to see what falls under the “directionally correct” criteria. You can (and should) click for a full-sized image.

Note: the error bars narrow as we progress further to the right because there are fewer observations with very large cardinality ratios. This is an artifact of the experimental design.

A few things jump out immediately:

• For cardinality ratio > 500, the majority of observations have many thousands of percent error.
• When cardinality ratio is smaller than that and $overlap > 0.4$, register count has little effect on error, which stays very low.
• When $overlap \le 0.01$, register count has little effect on error, which stays very high.

Just eyeballing this, the lesson I get is that computing intersection cardinality with small error (relative to the true value) is difficult and only works within certain constraints. Specifically,

1. $\frac{|A|}{|B|} < 100$, and
2. $overlap(A, B) = \frac{|A \cap B|}{min(|A|, |B|)} \ge 0.05$.

The intuition behind this is very simple: if the error of any one of the terms in your calculation is roughly as large as the true value of the result then you’re not going to estimate that result well. Let’s look back at the intersection cardinality formula. The left-hand side (that we are trying to estimate) is a “small” value, usually. The three terms on the right tend to be “large” (or at least “larger”) values. If any of the “large” terms has error as large as the left-hand side we’re out of luck.

So, let’s say you can compute the cardinality of an HLL with relative error of a few percent. If $|H_{A}|$ is two orders of magnitude smaller than $|H_{B}|$, then the error alone of $|H_{B}|$ is roughly as large as $|A|$.

$|A \cap B| \le |A|$ by definition, so

$|A \cap B| \le |A| \approx |H_{A}| \approx \Delta |H_{B}|$.

In the best scenario, where $A \cap B = A$, the errors of $|H_{B}|$ and $|H_{A \cup B}| \approx |H_{B}|$ are both roughly the same size as what you’re trying to measure. Furthermore, even if $|A| \approx |B|$ but the overlap is very small, then $|A \cap B|$  will be roughly as large as the error of all three right-hand terms.

### On the bubble

Let’s throw out the permutations whose error bounds clearly don’t support “directionally correct” answers ($overlap < 0.01$ and $\frac{|A|}{|B|} > 500$) and those that trivially do ($overlap > 0.4$) so we can focus more closely on the observations that are “on the bubble”. Sadly, these plots exhibit a good deal of variance inherent in their smaller sample size. Ideally we’d have tens of thousands of runs of each combination, but for now this rough sketch will hopefully be useful. (Apologies for the inconsistent colors between the two plots. It’s a real bear to coordinate these things in R.) Again, please click through for a larger, clearer image.

By doubling the number of registers, the variance of the relative error falls by about a quarter and moves the median relative error down (closer to zero) by 10-20 points.

In general, we’ve seen that the following cutoffs perform pretty well, practically. Note that some of these aren’t reflected too clearly in the plots because of the smaller sample sizes.

Register Count Data Structure Size Overlap Cutoff Cardinality Ratio Cutoff
8192 5kB 0.05 10
16384 10kB 0.05 20
32768 20kB 0.05 30
65536 41kB 0.05 100

### Error Estimation

To get a theoretical formulation of the error envelope for intersection, in terms of the two set sizes and their overlap, I tried the first and simplest error propagation technique I learned. For variables $Y, Z, ...$, and $X$ a linear combination of those (independent) variables, we have

$\Delta X = \sqrt{ (\Delta Y)^2 + (\Delta Z)^2 + ...}$

Applied to the inclusion-exclusion formula:

$\begin{array}{ll} \displaystyle \Delta |H_{A \cap B}| &= \sqrt{ (\Delta |H_{A}|)^2 + (\Delta |H_{B}|)^2 + (\Delta |H_{A \cup B}|)^2} \\ &= \sqrt{ (\sigma\cdot |A|)^2 + (\sigma\cdot |B|)^2 + (\sigma\cdot |A \cup B|)^2} \end{array}$

where

$\sigma = \frac{1.04}{\sqrt{m}}$ as in section 4 (“Discussion”) of the HLL paper.

Aside: Clearly $|H_{A \cup B}|$ is not independent of $|H_{A}| + |H_{B}|$, though $|H_{A}|$ is likely independent of $|H_{B}|$. However, I do not know how to a priori calculate the covariance in order to use an error propagation model for dependent variables. If you do, please pipe up in the comments!

I’ve plotted this error envelope against the relative error of the observations from HLLs with 8192 registers (approximately 5kB data structure).

Despite the crudeness of the method, it provided a 95% error envelope for the data without significant differences across cardinality ratio or $overlap$. Specifically, at least 95% of observations satisfied

$(|H_{A \cap B}| - |A \cap B|) < \Delta |H_{A \cap B}|$

However, it’s really only useful in the ranges shown in the table above. Past those cutoffs the bound becomes too loose and isn’t very useful.

This is particularly convenient because you can tune the number of registers you need to allocate based on the most common intersection sizes/overlaps you see in your application. Obviously, I’d recommend everyone run these tests and do this analysis on their business data, and not on some contrived setup for a blog post. We’ve definitely seen that we can get away with far less memory usage than expected to successfully power our features, simply because we tuned and experimented with our most common use cases.

### Next Steps

We hope to improve the intersection cardinality result by finding alternatives to the inclusion-exclusion formula. We’ve tried a few different approaches, mostly centered around the idea of treating the register collections themselves as sets, and in my next post we’ll dive into those and other failed attempts!

### Appendix A: A Review Of Sets

Let’s say we have two streams of user ids, $S_{A}$ and $S_{B}$. Take a snapshot of the unique elements in those streams as sets and call them $A$ and $B$. In the standard notation, we’ll represent the cardinality, or number of elements, of each set as $|A|$ and $|B|$.

Example: If $A = \{1,2,10\}$ then $|A| = 3$.

If I wanted to represent the unique elements in both of those sets combined as another set I would be performing the union, which is represented by $A \cup B$.

Example: If $A = \{1,2,3\}, B=\{2,3,4\}$ then $A \cup B = \{1,2,3,4\}$.

If I wanted to represent the unique elements that appear in both $A$ and $B$ I would be performing the intersection, which is represented by $A \cap B$.

Example: With $A, B$ as above, $A \cap B = \{2,3\}$.

The relationship between the union’s cardinality and the intersection’s cardinality is given by the inclusion-exclusion principle. (We’ll only be looking at the two-set version in this post.) For reference, the two-way inclusion-exclusion formula is $|A \cap B| = |A| + |B| - |A \cup B|$.

Example: With $A, B$ as above, we see that $|A \cap B| = 2$ and $|A| + |B| - |A \cup B| = 3 + 3 - 4 = 2$.

For convenience we’ll define the $overlap$ between two sets as $overlap(A, B) := \frac{|A \cap B|}{min(|A|, |B|)}$.

Example: With $A, B$ as above, $overlap(A,B) = \frac{|A \cap B|}{min(|A|, |B|)} = \frac{2}{min(3,3)} = \frac{2}{3}$.

Similarly, for convenience, we’ll define the cardinality ratio $\frac{max(|A|, |B|)}{min(|A|, |B|)}$ as a shorthand for the relative cardinality of the two sets.

The examples and operators shown above are all relevant for exact, true values. However, HLLs do not provide exact answers to the set cardinality question. They offer estimates of the cardinality along with certain error guarantees about those estimates. In order to differentiate between the two, we introduce HLL-specific operators.

Consider a set $A$. Call the HLL constructed from this set’s elements $H_{A}$. The cardinality estimate given by the HLL algorithm for $H_{A}$ is $|H_{A}|$.

Define the union of two HLLs $H_{A} \cup H_{B} := H_{A \cup B}$, which is also the same as the HLL created by taking the pairwise max of $H_{A}$‘s and $H_{B}$‘s registers.

Finally, define the intersection cardinality of two HLLs in the obvious way: $|H_{A} \cap H_{B}| := |H_{A}| + |H_{B}| - |H_{A \cup B}|$. (This is simply the inclusion-exclusion formula for two sets with the cardinality estimates instead of the true values.)

### Appendix B: A (Very Brief) Review of Error

The simplest way of understanding the error of an estimate is simply “how far is it from the truth?”. That is, what is the difference in value between the estimate and the exact value, also known as the absolute error.

However, that’s only useful if you’re only measuring a single thing over and over again. The primary criteria for judging the utility of HLL intersections is relative error because we are trying to measure intersections of many different sizes. In order to get an apples-to-apples comparison of the efficacy of our method, we normalize the absolute error by the true size of the intersection. So, for some observation $\hat{x}$ whose exact value is non-zero $x$, we say that the relative error of the observation is $\frac{x-\hat{x}}{x}$. That is, “by what percentage off the true value is the observation off?”

Example: If $|A| = 100, |H_{A}| = 90$ then the relative error is $\frac{100 - 90}{100} = \frac{10}{100} = 10\%$.

## Custom Input/Output Formats in Hadoop Streaming

Like I’ve mentioned before, working with Hadoop’s documentation is not my favorite thing in the world, so I thought I’d provide a straightforward explanation of one of Hadoop’s coolest features – custom input/output formats in Hadoop streaming jobs.

### Use Case

It is common for us to have jobs that get results across a few weeks, or months, and it’s convenient to look at the data by day, week, or month. Sometimes including the date (preferably in a nice standard format) in the output isn’t quite enough, and for whatever reason it’s just more convenient to have each output file correspond to some logical unit.

Suppose we wanted to count unique users in our logs by state, by day. The streaming job probably starts looking something like:

hadoop jar /path/to/hadoop-streaming.jar \
-input log_data/ \
-output geo_output/ \
-mapper geo_mapper.py \
-reducer user_geo_count_reducer.py \
-cacheFile ip_geo_mapping.dat#geo.dat


And the output from the job might look like:

2011-06-20,CA,1512301
2011-06-21,CA,1541111
2011-06-22,CA,1300001
...
2011-06-20,IL,23244
2011-06-21,IL,23357
2011-0-21,IL,12213
...


This is kind of a pain. If we do this for a month of data and all 50 states appear every day, that’s at least 1500 records – not quite so easy to eyeball. So, let’s ask Hadoop to give us a file per day, named YYYY-MM-DD.csv, that contains all the counts for that day. 30 files containing 50 records each is much more manageable.

### Write Some Java

The first step is to write some Java. I know, this is a tutorial about writing Input/Output formats for Hadoop streaming jobs. Unfortunately, there is no way to write a custom output format other than in Java.

The good news is that once you’re set up to develop, both input and output formats tend to take minimal effort to write. Hadoop provides a class just for putting output records into different files based on the content of each record. Since we’re looking to split records based on the first field of each record, let’s subclass it.

public class DateFieldMultipleOutputFormat
extends MultipleTextOutputFormat<Text, Text> {

@Override
protected String generateFileNameForKeyValue(Text key, Text value, String name) {
String date = key.toString().split(",")[0];
return date + ".csv";
}
}


It’s a pretty simple exercise, even if you’ve never written a single line of Java. All the code does is take the first field of the key and use it as the output filename. Honestly, the hardest part is going to be setting up your IDE to work with Hadoop (the second hardest part was finding this blog post).

### Use It

The most recent Hadoop documentation I can find, still has documentation on using custom Input/Output formats in Hadoop 0.14. Very helpful.

It turns out life is still easy. When you look at a less-misleading part of the Hadoop Streaming documentation, all the pieces you need are right there. There are flags, -inputformat and -outputformat that let you specify Java classes as your input and output format. They have to be in the Java classpath when Hadoop runs, which is taken care of by the -libjars generic Hadoop option. There is no need to compile a custom streaming jar or anything crazy (I found worse suggestions on StackOverflow while figuring this out).

Using this newfound wisdom, it’s pretty trivial to add the output format to the existing streaming job. The next version of the job is going to look something like:

hadoop jar /path/to/hadoop-streaming.jar \
-libjars /path/to/custom-formats.jar \
-input log_data/ \
-output geo_output/ \
-outputformat net.agkn.example.outputformat.DateFieldMultipleOutputFormat \
-mapper geo_mapper.py \
-reducer user_geo_count_reducer.py \
-cacheFile ip_geo_mapping.dat#geo.dat


### Pay Attention to the Details

If you write an output format like the one above and try to run a job, you’ll notice that some output records disappear. The overly-simple explanation is that Hadoop ends up opening the file for a specific date once for every reducer that date appears in, clobbering the data that was there before. Fortunately, it’s also easy to tell Hadoop how to send all the data from a date to the same reducer, so each file is opened exactly once. There isn’t even any Java involved.

All it takes is specifying the right partitioner class for the job on the command line. This partitioner is configured just like unix cut, so Data Scientists should have an easy time figuring out how to use it. To keep data from disappearing, tell the partitioner that the first field of the comma-delimited output record is the value to partition on.

With those options included, the final streaming job ends up looking like:

hadoop jar /path/to/hadoop-streaming.jar \
-libjars /path/to/custom-formats.jar \
-D map.output.key.field.separator=, \
-D mapred.text.key.partitioner.options=-k1,1 \
-input log_data/ \
-output geo_output/ \
-outputformat net.agkn.example.outputformat.DateFieldMultipleOutputFormat \
-mapper geo_mapper.py \
-reducer user_geo_count_reducer.py \
-cacheFile ip_geo_mapping.dat#geo.dat


On the next run all the data should appear again, and the output directory should contain a file per day there is output. It’s not hard to take this example and get a little more complicated – it’d take minimal changes to make this job output to a file per state, for example. Not bad for a dozen lines of code and some command line flags.

## My Love/Hate Relationship with Hadoop

A few months ago, the need for some log file analysis popped up. As the junior Data Scientist, I had the genuine pleasure of waking up one morning to an e-mail from Matt and Rob letting me know that I was expected to be playing with terabytes of data as soon as possible. Exciting, to say the least.

The project seemed like a perfect fit for Hadoop specifically Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR). So, I grabbed the company card, signed up, and dove right in. It’s been quite a learning experience.

After a few months learning the particulars of Amazon’s flavor of cloud computing and Hadoop’s take on distributed computing, I’ve developed a relationship with Hadoop as complicated as any MapReduce job – I’ve learned to love and loathe it at the same time.

### The Good

EMR is incredibly easy to interface with, despite some of Amazon’s tools being less-than stellar (I’m looking at you, Ruby CLI). The third-party APIs tend to be excellent. We’ve been using boto heavily.

Hadoop Streaming jobs are, like most everyone else on the internet will tell you, awesome for rapid prototyping and development. The rest of the Science team and I are not super concerned with speed for most of what we do in Hadoop, so we’re perfect users for Streaming jobs. We iterate on our models constantly, and Streaming makes it possible to easily test their behavior over whatever data we please.

The ability to include HIVE in an EMR workflow is yet another awesome bonus. It’s incredibly easy to boot up a cluster, install HIVE, and be doing simple SQL analytics in no time flat. External tables even make the data loading step a breeze.

While Hadoop and EMR have let us do some very cool things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, we’ve had some problems too.

I’ve blown up NameNodes, run into the S3 file size limit, and hit what feels like every pain point in-between while formatting and compressing our data. I’ve crashed every JVM that Hadoop has to offer, broken the HIVE query planner, and had Streaming jobs run out of memory both because they were badly designed, and because I didn’t tweak the right settings. In short, after just a few months, with what I would consider some fairly simple, standard use cases, I’ve run into every “standard” Hadoop problem, along with what feels like more than my fair share of non-standard problems.

While it should be no surprise to anyone that a lone data-scientist can wreak havoc on any piece of software, there was a certain flavor to an unsettling large amount of these crises that really started to bother me.

After running into the dfs.datanode.max.xcievers property problem mentioned in the post above, I put my finger on both what makes a problem quintessentially Hadoop-y and why a Hadoop problem isn’t a good one to have.

### The Ugly

To fix any problem, you have to know about the problem. To know about a problem, you must have read the documentation or broken something enough times to start to pinpoint it.

Reading the documentation isn’t an option for learning about dfs.datanode.max.xcievers. It’s badly documented, there’s no default anywhere and it’s misspelled (i before e except after c). But once you know what’s going on it’s an easy fix to change a cluster’s configuration.

What’s so bad about a Hadoop problem is that causing enough issues to figure out a cause takes a large amount of time, in what I find to be the most disruptive way possible. It doesn’t take a large number of tries, or any particularly intelligent debugging effort, just a lot of sitting and waiting to see if you missed a configuration property or set one incorrectly. It doesn’t seem so bad at first, but since these problems often manifest only in extremely large data-sets, each iteration can take a significant amount of time, and you can be quite a ways through a job before they appear. Investigative work in such a stop and go pattern, mixed with the worst kind of system administration, is killing me. I don’t want to stop working in the middle of a cool thought because I had to adjust a value in an XML document from 1024 to 4096.

Never mind the hardware requirements Hadoop presents, or issues with HDFS or any of the legitimate, low level complaints people like Dale have. I don’t like working on Hadoop because you have to keep so much about Hadoop in the back of your mind for such little, rare gains. It’s almost as bad as having a small child (perhaps a baby elephant?) on my desk.

### What’s Next

The easy solution is to insulate me, the analyst, from the engineering. We could throw cash at the problem and dedicate an engineer or three to keeping a cluster operable. We could build a cluster in our data center. But this isn’t practical for any small company, especially when the projects don’t require you to keep a cluster running 24/7. Not only could the company not afford it, but it would be a waste of time and money.

The hard solution is coming up with something better. The whole team at AK believes that there is a better way, that working with big data can still be agile.

If possible, I should be able to access a data-set quickly and cleanly. The size and complexity of the tools that enable me to work with big data should be minimized. The barrier to entry should be low. While there are projects and companies that are trying to make using Hadoop easier and easier, I think the fundamental problem is with the one-very-large-framework-fits-all approach to big data. While Hadoop, and batch processing in general, has it’s time and place, there’s no reason I should need an elephantine framework to count anything, or find the mean of a list of numbers.

The rest of AK seems to agree. We all think the solution has to incorporate batch processing, somehow, but still embrace clever ways to navigate a large, constantly flowing data set. The crazy people here even think that our solution can be reliable enough that a Data Scientist can’t be too smart (or just incompetent enough) to break it.