June 16, 2012

Introduction to Metamarkets and Druid

I previously dropped a few hints about my clients at Metamarkets, mentioning that they:

But while they’re a joy to talk with, writing about Metamarkets has been frustrating, with many hours and pages of wasted of effort. Even so, I’m trying again, in a three-post series:

Much like Workday, Inc., Metamarkets is a SaaS (Software as a Service) company, with numerous tiers of servers and an affinity for doing things in RAM. That’s where most of the similarities end, however, as  Metamarkets is a much smaller company than Workday, doing very different things.

Metamarkets’ business is SaaS (Software as a Service) business intelligence, on large data sets, with low latency in both senses (fresh data can be queried on, and the queries happen at RAM speed). As you might imagine, Metamarkets is used by digital marketers and other kinds of internet companies, whose data typically wants to be in the cloud anyway. Approximate metrics for Metamarkets (and it may well have exceeded these by now) include 10 customers, 100,000 queries/day, 80 billion 100-byte events/month (before summarization), 20 employees, 1 popular CEO, and a metric ton of venture capital.

To understand how Metamarkets’ technology works, it probably helps to start by realizing:

and further:

The whole thing is fully multi-tenant, at least by the point that data is being stored and visualized. Metamarkets customers either live in the Amazon cloud (the smaller ones), or else used to live there and don’t mind shipping their data back there for analysis by Metamarkets. Some “not exactly Ted Codd’s tabular DBMS” features are:

One thing MetaMarkets does that’s pretty much a best practice these days is roll out new code, mid-day if they like, without ever taking their system down. Why is this possible? Because the data is replicated across nodes, so you can do a rolling deployment of a node at a time without making any data unavailable. Notes on that include:

Comments

3 Responses to “Introduction to Metamarkets and Druid”

  1. Metamarkets Druid overview | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on June 16th, 2012 5:53 pm

    […] Introduction to Metamarkets and Druid […]

  2. Metamarkets’ back-end technology | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on June 16th, 2012 5:55 pm

    […] Introduction to Metamarkets and Druid […]

  3. What matters in investigative analytics? | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on October 7th, 2013 1:24 am

    […] in the context of analytic DBMS, but it also arises in analytic stacks such as Platfora, Metamarkets or even QlikView, and also in the challenges of making predictive modeling […]

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