Fiesta Fan Forums - Just downloaded LoL

http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/for-rio...ious-business/

Quote:

Welcome to Riot Games. Yes, the game-development firm has a policy of recruiting people who like to play games—it even has a “playfund,” an allowance of sorts that allows every employee to buy games, expense them, and (more importantly) play them during working hours. “When a big release of a game comes out, our productivity takes a nosedive,” said Barry Livingston, director of engineering for the Big Data group of the company. “We take play seriously, it is an important part of our culture.”

Quote:

In the beginning, Riot Games had a single analyst; that’s now expanded to an entire BI team of a dozen people and similar-sized engineering staff, divided between the headquarters office in Los Angeles and a remote office near St. Louis. “We now have tens of people here that can do Hive queries, and we want to enable more access to these kinds of ad hoc discoveries,” Livingston said.

Why St. Louis? Some of the founders grew up there, and they found that there is a lot of talent in the area: “Very big corporations based there, and we have had great luck attracting talented engineers who used to work at Mastercard or Anheuser Busch since our culture is very different. What makes it attractive is that our staff can work on something that millions of people see every day.”

Quote:

Riot eventually ended up with a combination of tools that work a mix of SQL and Big Data. “We wanted to provide dashboards for our company. We want our people to think about our data when they are making decisions,” Livingston added. These dashboards are built using Tableau, “but it doesn’t interact with Hive very well, such as giving out stats on win rates per champion by game time. We have graphical sliders so you can interact with the data, and every time you move the slider, you get hundreds of different Map Reduce jobs. So we put mySQL in between.”

Unrelated. But Tableau is the worssstttt...