Facebook's big data plans include warehouses, faster analytics

May 01, 2013

Facebook may treasure the data it has on its one billion-plus users for its advertising returns, but the analysis the site performs on that data is expected to continue to pose numerous challenges over the coming year, an engineer said. The problems, which Facebook has been forced to grapple with “much sooner than the broader industry,” include figuring out more efficient ways to process user behavior on the site, how to better access and consolidate different types of data across Facebook’s multiple data centers, and devising new open source software systems to process that data, Ravi Murthy, who manages Facebook’s analytics infrastructure, said Tuesday. “Facebook is a data company, and the most obvious thing people think of on that front is ads targeting,” he said at an industry conference in San Francisco, during a talk on Facebook’s back-end infrastructure, data analytics and open source projects. “But it goes deeper than this,” he said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2036941/facebooks-big-data-plans-include-warehouses-faster-analytics.html#tk.rss_all