3 ms·

The retrieval and processing of the data is done externally (i.e. not on your server).

• yummyfajitas 14y ago
  CA is 973M as zipped csv. CA is a bit over 10% of the US population, so the whole data set will be about 10gb. You can fit that on one of the cheaper linodes pretty easily. With a few indices and maybe even a materialized view (or even pruning data you don't need), you can answer most queries so fast that latency between linode and the census > query time. I know munging csv's and writing sql isn't as sexy as JSON APIs or mongodb, but sometimes the simple solutions are the right ones.
  • sholanozie 14y ago
    I don't disagree with you, but for many people it's far more convenient to query an external API than to create their own.
  • Zev 14y ago
    Why should I have to install Postgres to be able to play around with data? This is one less step to think about.
    • yummyfajitas 14y ago
      As I pointed out in my first comment, you can also just load it with pandas/excel/etc. I brought up postgres for the specific case of "queries on-demand on your web server or mobile app".
  • mkopinsky 14y ago
    >CA is 973M as zipped csv. CA is a bit over 10% of the US population, so the whole data set will be about 10gb. You can fit that on one of the cheaper linodes pretty easily. You forgot about unzipping. The total is 13.49 GB zipped, or 133.4 GB unzipped. [0] [0] http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/04-Summary_File_1/California/0README_SF1_v2.pdf http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/04-Summary_File_1/Califor...