Fox Interactive Media

As massive data acquisition and storage becomes increas-ingly affordable, a wide variety of enterprises are employing statisticians to engage in sophisticated data analysis. In this paper we highlight the emerging practice of Magnetic, Ag-ile, Deep (MAD) data analysis as a radical departure from traditional Enterprise Data Warehouses and Business Intel-ligence. We present our design philosophy, techniques and experience providing MAD analytics for one of the world’s largest advertising networks at Fox Interactive Media, us-ing the Greenplum parallel database system. We describe database design methodologies that support the agile work-ing style of analysts in these settings. We present data-parallel algorithms for sophisticated statistical techniques, with a focus on density methods. Finally, we reflect on database system features that enable agile design and flexi-ble algorithm development using both SQL and MapReduce interfaces over a variety of storage mechanisms. 1