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by sanderjd 1031 days ago
I guess I'll say what I think. I do think it is targeted at that smallest 80% of companies with some digital footprint, and also at most of the top 20%. Or more specifically, I think maybe it's targeted at like the 5th percentile to the 99th percentile. That bottom 5% probably just needs Excel, and that top 1% is probably writing or heavily modifying all their own tools.

But I'm not sure the advice is very good from the 5th percentile up to ... maybe that top 20%? A lot of the stuff in the article assumes the availability of sophisticated data architects and mature infrastructure groups that I really don't think the median company has.
1 comments
agent281 1031 days ago
I agree. Really seasoned data people are not common enough. Small companies need to buy services to lighten the load.

We both seem have a sense of the size of companies at different percentiles. At what percentile would you put your company with petabytes of data?

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sanderjd 1031 days ago
Super hard to say, so ... 80th or 90th? With very low confidence.

But I do have very high confidence that the 99th percentile is much larger than petabytes (think: what's next after "exa"), and I believe that many companies these days crack into "peta" territory.

But as I saw another comment mention, I think another, probably more important, consideration besides size in bytes is cardinality and structure. So maybe this whole classification we're doing is kind of beside the point :)

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agent281 1030 days ago
Yeah, it's hard to say with any certainty. I agree that the far end is the curve probably looks nothing like the "neighborhood" a couple percent away, relatively speaking.

I also agree that the variety of data plays a big part in its complexity. If you have a few petabytes of data, but it's really only a handful of tables you can real hone in on the relationships. If it's a wide array of sources with many tables between them then you have some nasty problems like entity resolution.

All happy data sets are alike; each unhappy data set is unhappy in its own way.

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sanderjd 1030 days ago
> All happy data sets are alike; each unhappy data set is unhappy in its own way.

Ha, gonna steal that for some doc I write someday :)

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agent281 1030 days ago
That's only fair: I stole it from Anna Karenina. :]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle#:~:t....

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sanderjd 1030 days ago
Ha I know, I love that opener, despite it being super cliche to love it. Things are usually cliches for a good reason :)
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