Santa’s Big List & NoSQL

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!