SE Radio 233: Fangjin Yang on OLAP and the Druid Real-Time Analytical Data Store

Fangjin Yang, creator of the Druid real-time analytical database, talks with Robert Blumen. They discuss the OLAP (online analytical processing) domain, OLAP concepts (hypercube, dimension, metric, and pivot), types of OLAP queries (roll-up, drill-down, and slicing and dicing), use cases for OLAP by organizations, the OLAP store's position in the enterprise workflow, what "real time" means in the analytics context, and the relationship between real-time analytics and the Lambda architecture. They then move on to Druid itself: a high-level view, the challenges of implementing real-time analytics, and major application domains for Druid. They also discuss ad-tech and real-time analytics and real-time analytics as an operational tool. Yang then addresses Druid internals: node types, the special handling of the time dimension, the Druid query language, and the relationship between SQL and OLAP. Closing topics are the Druid open source project, community contributions, and the size and scale of some of the larger Druid clusters.