This Halloween we shared horror stories we’ve experienced or heard of others experiencing in the world of big data and real-time analytics. Let’s go over a few horror stories, and also teach you how to fight back against some of these monsters.

First, to set the stage, let’s talk a little about real-time analytics. Here we mean systems capable of providing query results in subsecond to, at most, single-digit second latencies. The kind of responsiveness that can drive a mobile app, a web page, or an application in such a way that a typical user would perceive little or no delay. Plus, given the scale of user bases being in the millions these days, query concurrency needs to be able to scale throughout the day — a concept we refer to as user-facing analytics.