JarCastingManu: "Mostly archived, not updated"
A time series storage format for integers and floats, using efficient delta encodings from FastPFOR.
Examples: pageviews by article in Wikipedia, stock open/close/high/low prices, weather temperatures.
Components
- manu-format, a library for maintaining the data on disk
- manu-cli, a command-line tool for ingesting data into the format
- manu-serve, a web server to expose the data over REST
Design criteria
Priorities
- Cheap
- I'm doing this to drive a hobby project; my dream would be to host a variety of datasets for $10/month.
- A Fermi estimate suggests Wikipedia pageviews has 100B datapoints over the last 10 years. This implies that storage costs will dominate.
- Doesn’t need to be always-on
- This sort of follows from cheap -- the ability to load subsets of data, or to run on spot instances will be a useful tool to cut costs.
Non-priorities
- Concurrent / fast writes
- These can happen offline.
- Fast reads
- The pareto principle will likely apply to queries - 1% of keys will get 99% of reads. We can use Varnish or similar to cache at the application level.
Assumptions
- Dense datasets
- Keys: if we see a key once, we expect to see it again.
- Values: if key X has a datapoint at T1, we expect most other keys will as well.
- Correlated values
- Value for key X at T1 is likely related to value at T2.
- Some datasets can be lossy
- Wikipedia pageviews, e.g., are likely insensitive to precision so long as the trend is generally correct.
Obligatory
Credit: Our Greatest Asset, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal