I'll let Andrew or Luca answer the cost question.

Johnathan, totally agreed on the need for consistency in historical analysis.  As far as having edit data available back to 2001, we're working on rebuilding editing history and you'll see there's a lot of stuff that's not available via the APIs or quarry.  We'll talk more about that soon.

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 7:32 PM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Just curious -- how much would it cost to make all of the data available at a daily granularity for a year?

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Jonathan Morgan <jmorgan@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Dan,

Making dumps much easier to use would definitely help. We Wikipedia researchers are kind of spoiled: we have easy public access to historical revision data for all projects, going back to 2001, through the API and public db endpoints like Quarry. It's only natural that we want the same thing with pageviews!!! :)

I can think of other use-cases for keeping more than 18 months of data available through the API, but they're all research use cases. I don't think having lower-granularity historical data available beyond a certain point is helpful for those--if you're doing historical analysis, you want consistency. But a application that parsed dumps on the server-side to yield historical data (ideally in a format and granularity that wasn't fundamentally different from that of the API, so you could join the streams) would definitely be useful, and would probably address most research needs I can think of, inside and outside the Foundation.

Thanks for asking,
Jonathan

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Amir and Jonathan - thanks for speaking up for the "more than 18 months" use cases.  If dumps were *much* easier to use (via python clients that made it transparent whether you were hitting the API or not), would that be an acceptable solution?  I feel like both of your use cases are not things that will be happening on a daily basis.  If that's true, another solution would be an ad-hoc API that took in a filter and a date range, applied it server-side, and gave you a partial dump with only the interesting data.  If this didn't happen very often, it would allow us to trade processing time and a bit of dev time for more expensive storage.

Or, if we end up needing frequent access to old data, we should be able to justify spending more money on more servers.  Just trying to save as much money as possible :)

Thanks all so far, please feel free to keep chiming in if you have other use cases that haven't been covered, or if you'd like to add more weight behind the "more than 18 months" use cases.

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Leila Zia <leila@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dan, Thanks for reaching out.

18 months is enough for my use cases as long as the dumps capture the exact data structure.

Best,
Leila

--
Leila Zia
Senior Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 11:51 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

I am now checking traffic data every day to see whether Compact Language Links affect it. It makes sense to compare them not only to the previous week, but also to the same month previous year. So one year is not hardly enough. 18 months is better, and three years is much better because I'll be able to check also the same month in earlier years.

I imagine that this may be useful to all product managers that work on features that can affect traffic.


בתאריך 29 ביולי 2016 15:41,‏ "Dan Andreescu" <dandreescu@wikimedia.org> כתב:
Dear Pageview API consumers,

We would like to plan storage capacity for our pageview API cluster.  Right now, with a reliable RAID setup, we can keep 18 months of data.  If you'd like to query further back than that, you can download dump files (which we'll make easier to use with python utilities).

What do you think?  Will you need more than 18 months of data?  If so, we need to add more nodes when we get to that point, and that costs money, so we want to check if there is a real need for it.

Another option is to start degrading the resolution for older data (only keep weekly or monthly for data older than 1 year for example).  If you need more than 18 months, we'd love to hear your use case and something in the form of:

need daily resolution for 1 year
need weekly resolution for 2 years
need monthly resolution for 3 years

Thank you!

Dan

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