Technically, it is very interesting -- it uses Roaring Bitmaps under the hood and builds a query engine on it. So an easy way to think about it is that it maps categorical data into a giant compressible distributed bitmap.<p>I've been planning to see if I can (mis)use it as an OLAP replacement but I haven't had time to get to it.
>Pilosa is a standalone index for big data. Its goal is to help big data storage solutions support real time, complex queries without resorting to pre-computation or approximation. Pilosa achieves this goal by implementing a distributed bitmap index which provides a compact representation not of the data itself, but of the relationships present in the data.<p><a href="https://www.pilosa.com/pdf/PILOSA%20-%20Technical%20White%20Paper.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.pilosa.com/pdf/PILOSA%20-%20Technical%20White%20...</a>
Not sure who this document is aimed to. It's not technical enough to appeal to programmers that are working closely with Pilosa. And it's not written in a way to make it easy to understand for people that don't know anything about Pilosa (such as myself). I mean a subtitle called "Time Quantum" is enough to make me confused. Would appreciate a more generic "what is this" intro if possible.
"Continuous Analysis on Really Big Data -
Pilosa is an open source, distributed bitmap index" <a href="https://www.pilosa.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pilosa.com/</a>
Any chance there'll be some built-in support to perform collaborative filtering? Seems like a database of relations like this would be awesome for user-based collaborative filtering.