A few hardy souls pressed against the tide of humanity heading home after work last Tuesday to gather at a nondescript loft in downtown Boston. We carefully looked left and right before dodging in past the bouncer to join a select crowd in their new favorite adrenaline-pumping sport… Tweet Racing.
In Tweet Racing, each participant carefully selects a twitter search term for the race, betting on the term they hope the Twitterverse will smile upon. Thrown into the cage and subjected to Vertica’s live twitter sentiment analysis code, the terms dueled for an hour. There are no rules in Tweet Racing – anything goes. We watched as the participants encouraged their Twitter followers to tweet for their terms or brutally tweet down others.
In the end, we even learned a few things. People don’t feel very strongly about kittens on a Tuesday evening. However, “skrillex” is fairly popular, but it’s hard to beat “jolie” right after her Oscar Night poses.
But we weren’t there just to watch the races. New Blood Boston hosted the Vertica Engineering team for a discussion about ”Big Data” and how the Vertica Analytics Platform is a natural fit for many of the data problems facing start-ups today.
At the event, we showed how Vertica can blaze through anything from clickstream data with funnel analysis to graph problems like k-core and counting triangles – problems that may not initially appear to be database problems. We demonstrated what makes Tweet Racing possible in Vertica – the extensibility of the platform and its applicability to things outside the usual scope of the traditional SQL database.
But mostly, we were there to share our passion for Vertica and the engineering challenges that go into making it the industry’s most powerful, extensible analytics database.
Missed the New Blood Boston event? Check out our Vertica Community Edition to test drive Vertica and experience the thrills first hand!
