next*

We’ve had some great speakers at Brickhouse and last week’s talk by Jeff Hammerbacher of Facebook, part of the 2008 HackHouse talk series, was no exception. Jeff is head of data and analytics at Facebook. He spoke about his role, what his team has accomplished, and some of the challenges they face.

It was standing room only, highly technical, and totally engaging. Jeff described what it’s like to manage unprecedented growth of highly sensitive user data in a challenging business environment ("we’re collecting tens of terabytes of data every day”). The team first tried a standard MySQL database, but quickly outgrew it, and had to devise unique ways of doing weblog analysis.

I was personally interested in how Facebook deals with constantly changing data elements – it’s very hard to track historical trends when the data is always changing. At Facebook, they’ve built custom analytics packages to handle this problem and intend to release some of it open-source. Go Jeff!

Special thanks to Nikhil Bobb, from the BravoNation team, for inviting Jeff to come in and present; and to Ricky Montalvo, from the Yahoo! Developer Network, for the video.

Total runtime: 1hr:11min
download (m4v)

Editor's note: Jeff Hammerbacher's presentation, The Facebook Data team: Infrastructure and insight is also available on Slideshare. Thanks Jeff!

Popularity: 11% [?]