I think before we settle on a specific data store, we should determine what are the top queries people are interested in running, whether they expect to have scripted access to this data or primarily design a tool for human access and whether applying a threshold and cutting the long tail of low-traffic articles is a good approach for most consumers of this data.
The GLAM case described by Magnus is pretty well-defined, but I'd like to point out that: • a large number of Wikipedias point to stats.grok.se from the history page of every single article • most researchers I've been talking to are interested in daily or hourly pv data per article • tools with a large user base like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages refresh pv data on a weekly basis
Should we list the requirements for different use cases on a wiki page where a larger number of people than the participants in this thread can voice their needs?
Dario
On Oct 2, 2013, at 8:16 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 5:16 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote: Magnus Manske, 02/10/2013 10:12: Depending on the absolute value of "all costs", I'd prefer #1, or a combination of #2.
For GLAM (which is what I am mostly involved in), monthly page views would suffice, and those should be easily done in MySQL.
Daily views would be nice-to-have, but do not reed to be in MySQL. [...]
I'd second this. We have partners (but also, say, internal WikiProjects) working on a long tail of tens or hundreds thousand pages with their own project: cutting this long tail, including redlinks, would be a higher loss than a decrease in resolution.
Thank you both for the response, this is very useful to know. If I'm hearing people correctly so far:
- reduced resolution is OK, handle requests for higher resolution data further down the line.
- hacking the data to reduce size is OK if needed, but preferably the hacks should not be lossy.
- a database is not absolutely 100% necessary but is preferred.
If that's right, I have an additional question: would a non-relational database be acceptable? I'm not saying we're planning this, just wondering what people think. If, for example, the data would be available in a public Cassandra cluster. Would people be willing to understand how CQL [1] works?
[1] - http://cassandra.apache.org/doc/cql/CQL.html _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics