5 ms·

The only obvious advantage to a wide dataset to me is not having to join data entities, but I come from 25 years of mainly working with relational databases so

by thorin 3y ago

The only obvious advantage to a wide dataset to me is not having to join data entities, but I come from 25 years of mainly working with relational databases so I'm used to that. I can see that it would fix some problems around creating configurable SAAS products for instance rather than using entity attribute value model. Your data size is smaller than I expected and I'm still not sure I understand your use case. With that size of data you could choose pretty much any model and it would probably fit your requirements.

breck 3y ago
> The only obvious advantage to a wide dataset to me is not having to join data entities, but I come from 25 years of mainly working with relational databases so I'm used to that. Yes and that might be it and if so I don't think that's a huge benefit because joins are easy (with a little practice). > Your data size is smaller than I expected and I'm still not sure I understand your use case. With that size of data you could choose pretty much any model and it would probably fit your requirements. This is helpful feedback. I realize I'm not phrasing my question correctly. Nothing I'm trying to do is hard on the computing end. What I'm trying to model is the ~value~ of a "computable encyclopedia". Imagine if Wikipedia was just infoboxes. If you had a single table 10 million rows long, but with maybe ~100,000 columns, would that be: _meh_ or a _step change_ in value? My thinking is the latter. If I wanted to learn about "bicycles" I could ask dozens of ad hoc structured questions from such a table and get instant answers as opposed to reading and digesting narratives. My hunch is that such a structured dataset would be a significant increase in value over Wikipedia, but I'm not sure if I'm right and haven't yet been able to model from first principles why this would be right. I could be wrong.
- thorin 3y ago
  It you could ask the question again with that information, I'll bet there are a load of people who could explain it better, I don't really have the experience to give a definitive answer on that use case without giving it a lot of thought.

by thorin 3y ago

breck 3y ago

> The only obvious advantage to a wide dataset to me is not having to join data entities, but I come from 25 years of mainly working with relational databases so I'm used to that. Yes and that might be it and if so I don't think that's a huge benefit because joins are easy (with a little practice). > Your data size is smaller than I expected and I'm still not sure I understand your use case. With that size of data you could choose pretty much any model and it would probably fit your requirements. This is helpful feedback. I realize I'm not phrasing my question correctly. Nothing I'm trying to do is hard on the computing end. What I'm trying to model is the ~value~ of a "computable encyclopedia". Imagine if Wikipedia was just infoboxes. If you had a single table 10 million rows long, but with maybe ~100,000 columns, would that be: _meh_ or a _step change_ in value? My thinking is the latter. If I wanted to learn about "bicycles" I could ask dozens of ad hoc structured questions from such a table and get instant answers as opposed to reading and digesting narratives. My hunch is that such a structured dataset would be a significant increase in value over Wikipedia, but I'm not sure if I'm right and haven't yet been able to model from first principles why this would be right. I could be wrong.

thorin 3y ago
It you could ask the question again with that information, I'll bet there are a load of people who could explain it better, I don't really have the experience to give a definitive answer on that use case without giving it a lot of thought.