Freebase

At the SIP Symposium (at Stanford), there were some guys from the Freebase development crew. This was my first exposure to Freebase and I was intrigued with the idea. According to Kurt Bollacker (the Chief Scientist) the reason they were at the symposium was to "get people using our data". I also learned from him that they were VC funded and currently had about 60 developers.

They have built upon the existing data sources, such as Wikipedia, and have added structurally typed data to go along with it. The resulting data repository is then easily accessible via the Freebase API.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with it.

Export data from Postgres

To export data from Postgres to an output file of your choice can be done by following the simple steps below:

1. Start psql with the database that you'd like to export from...

$ psql [DATABASE]

2. Toggle the output mode to unaligned (\a toggles between unaligned and aligned output mode)

=# \a

3. Turn "tuples only" off (\t toggles between tuples on and off)

=# \t

4. Set the output file (replace [FILE] with what you'd like to call your output file). It will send all query results to the file or |pipe.

=# \o [FILE]

5. Run whatever query you'd like to send to the output file. For example,

=# SELECT * FROM [TABLE];


In summary:

\a
\t
\o /tmp/outputfile.txt
SELECT ......
\o

Google and data

Here is an interesting article about Google and all their data.

24 Key Database Marketing Techniques

This article is a good overview of 24 marketing methods which are useful in determining what data should be collected in order to personalize a website.