A couple of years ago I thought I would help out that “big syndicate up north” with its Christmas-gift operations. Wired had just run a big info graphic on what it would take to get the job done – > 34 million gifts, 3,148 home innovations per second, a team of 2.7 million people and operating costs of at least $27.5 billion.
So I thought maybe I could help reduce some of the costs and complexity by using a next-generation database? We couldn’t have Santa struggling with rows and columns and data modeling to make his list (it is a document after all!). And how about some big data processing approaches to check it and hand out the gifts?
Here is the post, as-is, from 2007. Careful readers will note that Amazon’s top gift this year is Cards Against Humanity and not Jakks Bionic Eye (what was that??). But I did just rerun all the code using MarkLogic 7 and, testament to MarkLogic’s continuous development and consistency across versions, it works fine!
Enjoy and happy holidays!
Matt Turner
Matt Turner is the CTO, Media and Manufacturing at MarkLogic where he develops strategy and solutions for the media, entertainment and manufacturing markets. Matt works with customers and prospects to develop MarkLogic enterprise NoSQL operational data hubs that enable them to get the most of their data and deliver their products to the fans, audiences and customers that love them.
Before joining MarkLogic, Matt was at Sony Music and PC World developing innovative information and content delivery applications.