Wal-Mart's Data Obsession

g8oz writes "The New York Times covers Wal-Mart's obsession with collecting sales data. Fun fact: 'Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.' That much information results in some interesting data-mining. Did you know hurricanes increase strawberry Pop Tarts sales 7-fold?"

Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

and shopping there means your income has dropped 7-fold

I, for one,

[fiftyfly]

would like to welcome our new (evil) data collecting overlords.

Haha...

[GR1NCH]

you fools have no idea that I would never let you hurt the Wall-Mart

More than the Internet ?!

[architimmy]

Someone at Walmart has ALOT of pr0n!

You gotta love "experts"

[broothal]

the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts

What's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah - it's bullshit

the real interesting part is...

[Coneasfast]

they're storing them on a huge cluter of their $200 lindows systems. ;)

Re:FUCK the New York Times

[UserGoogol]

The moderation on this guy amuses the hell out of me. Instead of saying "Why can't you be nice? -1 Troll" you say "Yeah, I know. -1 Redundant."

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Please remind me

[nerd256]

I've been reading the comments
I forgot, are we supposed to hate Wallmart?

On one hand they are a large corporate empire and on the other, they promote cheap linux computers.

arg, Im so confused

Re:economies of scale

[seann]

select sFirstName,sLastName,iPhone from LargeAssDatabase where bWelFare = False;

go on vacation for a week or ten..

deal with resulted data.

Pop Tarts

[evilviper]

Did you know hurricanes increase strawberry Pop Tarts sales 7-fold?

Yes I did. God help me!

460 terabytes?

[Anonymous Coward]

460 terabytes? chargen would seem to disagree.

Re:2004 = 1984 + 20;

[nwbvt]

Yeah, all that evil marketing data is really oppressing the masses and restricting the free flow of ideas.

Re:Heh, lets see if this "predicting" works

[Anonymous Coward]

You worked for Kmart, right?

Speaking of food trends, stop buying yeast!

[JoeShmoe950]

Did you know?
EVERY TIME A LOAF OF BREAD IS BAKED,
APPROXIMATELY
150,000,000 YEASTS ARE
KILLED

Come to the award-winning 1987 film,
"The Very Small and Quiet Screams"
-- a cinematic electromicrograph of yeasts being baked.

A must for those who care about yeast, and especially for those who don't.

SPONSORED BY
Brown Anaerobe Rights Coalition (BARC)
Student Bakers for Social Responsibility
Coalition for the Elevation of Life (CELL)

Defend all life: "From greatest to least, from human to yeast!"

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorta like running Linux.

Re:Correlation doesn't imply causation!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a well-known fact that hurricanes bring toasters and mini-fridges, so Pop Tarts and beer are logical purchases.

I'm not afraid..

[Robber Baron]

Did you know hurricanes increase strawberry Pop Tarts sales 7-fold? ...and if you needed a 460 TB data array to tell you that then you're too stupid to live.

Re:Yeah

[takeya]

Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.' ...

normally, but I guess they didn't check when I was sharing my pr0n on direct connect.

Re:Expert source

[Alioth]

I think the experts as in ex=former and spurt=drip under pressure.

Re:economies of scale

[k4_pacific]

It's simple really. Each piece of data is given 2 32 bit keys. One is called the selector, the other the offset. The selector key is left-shifted 8 bits and added to the offset to generate the physical address of the data. Thus, any piece of data can be accessed if you know hits selector and offset.

Welcome to the United States of WalMart

[eclectro]

For which it stands, one store under God, indivisible, with sales and product for all.

From the article;

"You can see the pattern of Wal-Mart's mandates, and as Wal-Mart grows in power, it is getting more dictatorial.....Wal-Mart lives in a world of supply and command, instead of a world of supply and demand."

Re:economies of scale

[kimanaw]

"...Teradata databases can reasonably claim to be to Oracle as Oracle is to MySQL."

Except it takes 8 Teradata DBAs to manage the 460 TBytes, and 23 Oracle DBAs to manage 1 Gig ;^) (Not a slam on Oracle DBAs, but on the ridiculous management burden of Oracle)

This is all fine and dandy, but ...

[isometrick]

... do they have a freezer big enough for 460TB worth of drives?

Re:2004 = 1984 + 20;

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should switch to Wal-Mart. I hear Wal-Mart Pharmacy has the cheapest anti-psychotic medications in the US.

Re:230 terabytes? Please

[Txiasaeia]

Hugh Hefner?!? Dude, didn't think you'd be posting anonymously! Share the wealth, man :)

Re:I, for one,

[jepaton]

Is the old (evil) data collecting overlords the NYT?

Strange how you have to give your details to read an article on data collection. And where is the traditional slashdot warning for the NYT?

Re:Please remind me

[TelJanin]

Hate. The computers come with Lindows.

Re:Correlation doesn't imply causation!!!!!

[Daniel]

Soooooooooooooooooo....

If pop tart sales go up, head for high ground? :-)

Daniel

incredible!

[Scrameustache]

That much information results in some interesting data-mining. Did you know hurricanes increase [non-perishable food item] sales 7-fold?

It took them 460 terabytes of data to figure out that hurricanes make people buy more non-perishable food than usual?

Wow, data mining is "usefull"...

Re:Seen it!

[.com b4 .storm]

1 year = 52.177457 weeks
So 72 weeks is 1 year plus 19.822543 weeks.

No, the grandparent poster was correct - 72 weeks is 1 year plus 2 weeks, if you're using Canadian years.

Re:Seen it!

[alkali]

The gentleman who gave me the tour indicated they have something like 72 weeks (1 year plus 2 weeks) of purchase data on LIVE disk arrays, plus huge archives of the same data on tape. If you buy anything and use your credit, debit, or whatever card they can figure out your sales history obscenely quickly. Be afriad. Be very afraid.

Did he happen to mention anything about an attack on Zion?

Big deal

[rsilvergun]

Ok, people are going to be without power for a while, possibly a long while, and Walmart predicted the sale of nearly unperishable dry goods would rise? My God, the sheer genius of it baffles me!

Call me when they can Mathmatically prove which flavors are most popular in a Hurricane.

Re:230 terabytes? Please

[Anonymous Coward]

They got their Internet statistics from the Chinese government.

Re:I would have thought that the Internet had more

[Sepper]

That's 20 terabytes per month, not per day.
Even with that number, I wouldn't want to be the Hard Drive specialist...

Interviewer:Would care to describe you previous job?
-Installing HDs 24/7.

Re:And in other news...

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Though I would be interested to read more on the pop-tart to hurricane correlation..."

I think they mispelled "Phish concert".

Re:Seen it!

[Lord_Dweomer]

Being there must've been similar to being a time traveler being sent back to WWII and meeting Hitler (yeah yeah, Godwin can cram it), knowing full well that if you just took him out now, you'd save a lot of trouble later on.

No seriously, why didn't you trash their data and free us all?

Re:460 TB is nothing we have 25X that

[marauder404]

300k employees all with desk jobs?

New data measurement type

[snaphu]

As mentioned by a friend when referrering to his video clip collection (but it doesn't help the videos/films he makes):
"Oh, I have a few frigabytes of data."
"Frigabyte? What's that?"
"Oh, that's a friggin lot of data."

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never actually had a pop tart in my life.

Ok, buddy, you can hand in your geek card right now...

Re:Did you know...

[Trogre]

then if they deem it neccessary THEY will call the REAL 911!

You mean like 912?

Walmarts storage breakdown (where 460Tb goes)...

[millst]

Walmarts storage breakdown (where 460Tb goes)...

Illicit Pornography 200Tb
Hidden Toilet Camera archive footage 100Tb
Sys admins private warez collection 80Tb
Previous employees records 60Tb
CIO's mp3's 15Tb
Sales Records 3Tb
Records of Returned / Faulty Products 2Tb

But Nobody Should Really Need...

[philntc]

... More than 640 Terabytes anyway, right?

(did I just say that out loud?)...

Re:Seen it!

[subbuk]

> According to Google:
> 1 year = 52.177457 weeks

You need google to say that?

Re:Huh?

[Reality Master 101]

The best thing a consumer can do to counteract this consumer surveillance is to toss junk into the system. Here are a few suggestions: [snip insane list]

[RM101's mind boggles]

Dude, do you seriously have nothing better to do than spend this crazy amount of time feeding junk data into a supermarket computer? Go outside. Breathe the air.

I dunno, maybe you WILL lay on your death bed, not thinking of your wife, or children, but you'll be proud of how many hours you spent contaminating some database.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you learn to spell terabyte properly, you'll save about 11% storage space for that word!

I'll see your terabyte and raise you a googolbyte

[tyler_larson]

By installing this simple CGI script on my home computer, I've done better far than that. I can now claim the distinction of hosting the majority of the internet on my very own laptop!

#!/bin/bash
echo "Content-type: text/plain"
echo
cat /dev/urandom | uuencode

Re:economies of scale

[Saeger]

The hard part is keeping all those disks spinning when you start pushing MTBF limits

So hire a monkey to sit in front of the rack. Condition him to hotswap a new hot spare when a red light & alarm goes off. If he replaces the drive before the old RAID hotspare gets rebuilt, he gets a treat; if not, a ZZZZZzzaaaappp! :)

--

Oblig South Park Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dad, how does walmart sell everything so cheap?"

"Well son, it's simple economics. Which I don't understand one bit."

Re:Yeah

[Ricdude]

To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.' ...

But if you only count the useful data ...

Re:Yeah

[toddestan]

normally, but I guess they didn't check when I was sharing my pr0n on direct connect.

No kidding, it's kind of eerie thinking that I got about 1/500th of the internet sitting right here in my room.

Wait. Did I just say that out loud?

Wal-Mart has anal implants

[mveloso]

Did you know that Wal-Mart anally implants a tracking device into each employee?

It's to measure the stool production of each employee. You see, Wal-Mart realized that you can only eat so much during your breaks. Excessive stool production implies that your breaks are too long. Any employee with excessive stool production is flagged and actively monitored by store management.

It also is linked into the in-store McDonalds'. If an employee is producing too little stool, the employee is forwarded to the McDonalds for a quick snack, increasing the blood sugar of the employee and boosting productivity. /conspiracy

640TB ought to be enough for anybody

[StikyPad]

'Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.'

Apparently the "experts," overlooked alt.binaries.*

Fun with Data.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to buy strange things together.

Extra Large condoms, fruit, and k-y gelly.

Have a lot of fun,
-Steve

Re:Walmart does drop your income

[pyrote]

look all we have to do is go to the electronics section and open up the panel... heck its only a mirror.

(note: if you don't get it, don't mod it)

Re:Walmart does drop your income

[wash23]

To destroy the walmart, you must strike it's heart. A small mirror in the back near the television department....

Re:Walmart does drop your income

[Anonymous Coward]

Last weekened picked up some Heinz ketchup,Silk soy milk, the Star Wars Trilogy DVD, and some Hefty garbage bags. Had I known these were substandard products I would have never bought them there. I guess I will return all that stuff and run over to Target and buy the premium versions of Heinz ketchup,Silk soy milk, the Star Wars Trilogy DVD, and some Hefty garbage bags. Thanks for the info!

Re:So, if Walmart put up a web interface...

[scribblej]

Hang on, I can count that:

We've got one bit set to 1... ...and one bit set to 0... .... hrm... everything else seems to be a repeat of the same data...

I get 2. 2 bits of data on the internet. Hang on, I'll recount to be sure I didn't miss anything. Nope, just two bits...