Last weekend we took part in the WHAT datathon – a data science competition accompanying the WHAT behavioral data conference organized by Wakoopa.And YES, we won the Gfk Insights track! THE CHALLENGE The challenge was to uncover business insights in clickstream data. We got data of one month in 2016 of a Dutch panel that shows how people have been using …
THE RISE OF PROGRAMMATIC BUYING More and more online ad space is sold nowadays via a process called programmatic buying. What this means, is that every time a person visits a website or an app with an advertising space, this space is offered for sale on an auction. Advertisers can now bid for this person’s attention …
Rax 1.2 with shiny new features is now available! Get your fee Rax for SQLite copy to try it out! Regular Expressions Rax supports now Perl-compatible regular expressions to simply matching text fields, for example URLs. Rax has two new match operators: =~ (match) and !~ (not match). For example, to select all web clicks …
Rax string reduction, /cat(), on the IMPALA backend was not trivial to implement. The IMPALA documentation states: GROUP_CONCAT … does not support the OVER clause, … Effectively this means no ORDER BY on GROUP_CONCAT in IMPALA. This must be implemented eventually, because the whole GROUP_CONCAT has limited use without it. Meantime, regexes can be used …
We are happy to announce that Rax 1.1 is avalaible from today! This release contains many stability and performance improvements. Most importantly: Added r’years and a’weeks magic tags to relative duration. Added a sample \ operator for sets: some_set\10 will list random 10 elements of some_set. In explorative analytics scenarios this is handy as it’s …
A common problem in web analytics is sessionization or session reconstruction: taking a series of user events and splitting the series into a set of sessions [1]. Often, it is done based solely on the timestamps of the events: a session ends after a certain time of user inactivity. As an example, let’s take the …
Snowflake Computing has recently emerged from stealth with a bold claim of having reinvented the data warehouse. Ease of use is their main motto and I dare to say they live up to this promise. Since one of Snowflake’s co-founders, Marcin Żukowski, is a good friend of mine, I’ve got a chance to play with …
Our SQL-backend family is contantly growing. Rax could already connect to SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Now we have also ported Rax to two major cloud databases: Microsoft Azure and AWS Redshift. The port to Azure gave us some headache due to problems with their ODBC driver for Linux. The port to Redshift was straightforward, …
With behavioral data, time plays a very important role. Yet, time-related data is especially hard to analyze. The main culprit is the fact that time concepts are confusing. While humans can handle time intuitively, passing these intuitions to a computer program is hard. For example, implementing a growth rate using a relative duration of “twelve …
Programming is hard. There is a lot of complexity that needs to handled. To hide at least some of this complexity, people come up with abstractions. SQL is an example of an abstraction – it provides a way to process data without worrying about all sorts of details like: How to find the relevant data …