Big Ideas

Follow our adventures as we make data instantly accessible to both humans and machines.

Pilosa 1.4 Released

Featured • 9/18/2019 • 7 min read

Yesterday we cut Pilosa v1.4.0 — our first new minor version since April! While we haven’t made an official release since then, several of Molecula’s clients have been using much of the new Pilosa code for some time and some of the improvements are vast.

Matthew Jaffee

The Effort Behind Marginal Performance Improvements

8/24/2020 • 5 min read

A look at the amount of effort that we sometimes put into pursuing performance. Background Pilosa is built on the Roaring bitmaps ...

Kuba Podgórski and Alan Bernstein

The Value in Failed Prototypes

12/20/2019 • 12 min read

To solve hard problems successfully, you usually have to be willing to solve them unsuccessfully in order to learn more about ...

Seebs

Apophenia: Seeking Patterns in Randomness

8/29/2019 • 7 min read

Apophenia provides a seekable (but not cryptographically secure) PRNG implementation. Because what’s the point in random ...

Seebs

Building Throwaway Machines with Terraform

8/27/2019 • 3 min read

Looking for an easy way to quickly try out some new whiz-bang software safely and securely? Look no further!

Todd Gruben

How to Generate an Arbitrarily Large Amount of Test Data

8/21/2019 • 6 min read

Have you ever looked at some publicly available data, and thought, “I wish this data set was 100 times larger”? It ...

Alan Bernstein

Building On a Strong Foundation

5/23/2019 • 2 min read

In 2017, we open-sourced Pilosa with the goal of transforming the world of big data analytics using the power of bitmap indices ...

Cody Soyland

Writing a Custom Handler for Oracle GoldenGate

2/18/2019 • 11 min read

In this post, we will cover creating a custom handler for Oracle GoldenGate which updates the data in a Pilosa server.

Yüce Tekol

I Hope You Like Charts: Benchmarks On 4 Clouds

2/13/2019 • 9 min read

This is a follow-on post to multi-cloud benchmarks. Previously, we ran a number of Pilosa specific benchmarks across a variety of ...

Matt Jaffee

Oracle, AWS, and Azure Benchmarking Shootout

1/13/2019 • 11 min read

Psst - when you’re done with this, check out part 2. For those unfamiliar, Pilosa is an open source, distributed index which ...

Matt Jaffee

We Raised our Seed Round

11/12/2018 • 3 min read

Today, we are excited to announce the first close of a $5.4 million Seed Round led by Skylark Partners. With this investment, John ...

HO Maycotte

Pilosa 1.0 Released

7/10/2018 • 2 min read

Pilosa is happy to announce version 1.0, available as of last week! After eight feature-heavy major releases since our launch, ...

Alan Bernstein

Genome Comparisons in 4 Milliseconds

5/1/2018 • 9 min read

6 Gigabits. That’s about how much data is encoded in your DNA. That may sound like a lot, or a little depending on your ...

Alan Bernstein and Matt Jaffee

Pilosa Featured On Changelog's GoTime Podcast

4/18/2018 • 1 min read

Since we write in Go all day, everyday, we LOVE Changelog’s GoTime Podcast. The show consists of a panel of Go experts and special ...

Sarah King

Getting On the Map: Joining the Cloud Native Landscape

3/13/2018 • 2 min read

In an effort to stay relevant and cutting edge, more enterprises are having to swiftly migrate their monolith to fully distributed ...

Sarah King

Supercharge Azure Cosmos DB with Pilosa

2/22/2018 • 7 min read

Pilosa is already super fast for huge data. Our next step is making it easy.

Alan Bernstein and Matt Jaffee

Pilosa 0.8.8 Released

2/19/2018 • 2 min read

Pilosa has seen a handful of releases since v0.6.0 was announced. Pilosa v0.7.0 was released on October 10, 2017, with a number of ...

Alan Bernstein

Secret Sauce - How is Pilosa Different?

12/12/2017 • 5 min read

By now, most of us have heard a thousand and one pitches for data products - and if you’re anything like me, you’ve ...

Matt Jaffee

Real-time Data Use Case Series: Healthcare

11/17/2017 • 5 min read

The big data landscape is advancing rapidly, and changing healthcare as we know it.

Ali Cooley

Writing a Pilosa Client Library

11/10/2017 • 21 min read

In this post, we will cover creating a Pilosa client library by going through the steps of writing one in Lua.

Yüce Tekol

Real Time Queries Without Compromises

10/24/2017 • 5 min read

The desire to eliminate barriers between raw data and useful insights has driven decades of engineering innovation. Countless ...

Ali Cooley and Matt Jaffee

Using Bitmaps to Perform Range Queries

10/4/2017 • 11 min read

Pilosa stores integer values in Base-2, Range-Encoded, Bit-sliced Indexes. This post explains what all that means.

Travis Turner

A Map of the Entire Universe

8/25/2017 • 17 min read

… the universe of 65536-bit sets in Roaring, that is. This is one part debugging postmortem, one part documentation, and ...

Alan Bernstein

Pilosa 0.6.0 Released

8/11/2017 • 1 min read

The Pilosa team is happy to announce the release of Pilosa 0.6.0, massively speeding up Pilosa with Run-length Encoding. This ...

Cody Soyland

Self Deploying Applications With Go

8/4/2017 • 7 min read

What if your apps handled their own ops? That’s kind of like devops’ final form, right? Its ultimate evolution? The ...

Matt Jaffee

Gophercon 2017: Technical Overview

7/26/2017 • 7 min read

In addition to sponsoring Gophercon 2017, our team sent several of us engineers to Gophercon. Predictably, we all had a blast.

Matt Jaffee, Linh Vo, and Travis Turner

How Gophercon Changed Pilosa’s Approach to Community

7/21/2017 • 3 min read

Like all avid Gophers, several Pilosa team members made the annual pilgrimage to Denver, CO for this year’s highly anticipated ...

Ali Cooley

Adding Run Length Encoding Support to Pilosa

7/10/2017 • 6 min read

Pilosa is built on our 64-bit implementation of Roaring bitmaps, generally accepted as the best approach to compressed ...

Alan Bernstein and Matt Jaffee

OSCON 2017 Recap: The Index As a First Class Citizen

6/24/2017 • 2 min read

OSCON 2017 was our first conference as a company. Held in our backyard here in Austin, TX, and coming just days after our official ...

Ali Cooley

Tanimoto & Chemical Similarity with Pilosa

6/15/2017 • 5 min read

As we continue to test Pilosa against various types of data (e.g., the Billion Taxi Ride Dataset), we decided to turn our next ...

Linh Vo

Pilosa 0.4.0 Released

6/8/2017 • 2 min read

The Pilosa team is happy to announce the release of Pilosa 0.4.0, marking our second minor release since open-sourcing on April 29 ...

Cody Soyland

The Billion Taxi Ride Dataset with Pilosa

6/2/2017 • 5 min read

Pilosa was originally built for the very specific use case of arbitrary audience segmentation on hundreds of millions of people ...

Matt Jaffee and Alan Bernstein

The OSCON 2017 Guide to Authentic Austin Tacos

5/10/2017 • 3 min read

Before we begin, OSCONers, let’s get real: If you’re not brave enough to order from a food truck, this list is not for you. Four ...

Ali Cooley

OSCON 2017: The Index As a First Class Citizen

5/5/2017 • 2 min read

Don’t miss Pilosa’s Lead “Slothware” Engineer, Matt Jaffee, at his O’Reilly Open Source Convention speaking debut! Titled ...

Ali Cooley

Pilosa at OSCON 2017

5/5/2017 • 2 min read

Join us for the official launch of Pilosa at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in our home town of Austin, Texas!

Ali Cooley

Hello, World

4/29/2017 • 2 min read

We are Pilosa, order of the sloth. We make slothware.

Our slumber (which is what some call a group of sloths) has created a ...

Travis Turner