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This morning the Big Data online marketplace vendor Infochimps announces a new analytics dashboard for their services called Dashpot.

Dashpot lets users configure their dashboard with exactly the information they need. For example, users can visualize their data in the form of line graphs, heat maps, geographic maps, counters, pie charts, or lists. You can also customize with selects, filters and sorts, to let users setup drilldowns for zooming in and out on their data, too.This lets users of different types and skill levels create multiple views depending on who is interacting with a given dashboard, and also specify what information each view should show.

If you are interested in Big Data you might want to keep your calendar open in late April for some interesting meetups. Every day starting with Monday April 23 will have at least one meeting going on in cities around the world on various Big Data topics including data science, data visualization and specific software development tool-related user groups around data-related businesses. There are activities scheduled in New York and San Francisco as well as Sydney Australia and London. And they have a cool logo, too.

Maybe Marc Goodman's talk from the Strata Summit on the business of illegal data grabbed me because I just finished watching the entire series of The Sopranos from start to finish last week. But even if you don't have a penchant for mob shows, Goodman's talk is worth the time to watch.

As we wax on about the wonders of big data, Goodman reminds us "the more data you produce, the more criminals are happy to receive what you produce."

Back when kids played outdoors in playgrounds, there was some taunt about acting your age not your shoe size. Well, IBM has managed to figure out that the median shoe heel height for women has been dropping for the fashion conscious, quite precipitately it seems over the past couple of years. IBM based its conclusions on tens of thousands of blog posts and other social media references about shoe discussions. They looked for the key footwear influencers, those who were passionate about their shoes and had large social followings online. So the median height has gone from an incredible seven inches in 2009 down to two this year.

Some of the larger-scale data deployments are handled by cloud software vendor Appistry and today they announced a new line of products to make massive data manipulations easier. Called (unfortunately) Ayrris, it will replace its existing CloudIQ line and focus on open scalable solutions for this space. The line includes Ayrris/Bio for next generation gene sequencing tasks, Ayrris/Defense for government and intelligence data apps, and Ayrris/Finance.

We haven't written much on Appistry, a St. Louis-based cloud data management and analytics applications vendor. So when it was in the news this week with raising a new round of venture funding, it seemed like a good time to cover it here.

Its product family is called CloudIQ and there are several different components. First is the CloudIQ Manager that configures the components and monitors their health. Next is CloudIQ Storage module, which allows Hadoop users to upgrade to their storage repository when you need more reliable operations and higher throughput. And finally there is CloudIQ Engine, which is used to build scalable analytical applications.

We cover big data often, from its definition to its limits. Yet we're always still in awe of just how much data is being collected and how quickly it's being generated.

This infographic from GetSatisfaction is the latest to try to put it all into perspective. GetSatisfaction looks at how much data is harvested by different industries, and how much that data may be worth. For example, did you know that the average securities and investment firm with fewer than 1,000 employees will have 3.8 petabytes of data stored?

So you want to buy a tractor? Build a house? Scrabble? So do the more than 62 million other gamers who play Farmville daily. That's why keeping its communities humming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and responding to issues in real-time is no game for Zynga.

To get the job done, the company turned to Vertica, which is now owned by HP. Says Ken Rudin, VP of Analytcs at Zynga: "With over 40 million players, 3TB of new data a day and 230 nodes spread across two clusters, Zynga's columnar data warehouse from Vertica is no analytical windup toy."

This week Basho, the company behind the open source NoSQL database Riak, released a beta of Riak Pipe. Basho community manager Mark Philips describes Pipe as "more or less a rewrite of our existing MapReduce framework. It builds on the lessons we learned in the initial (and still in use) version of MapReduce." You can find the code in GitHub.

When we talk about the benefits of using a non-relational database management system, often referred to as a NoSQL database, we sometimes lose track of what a traditional database is still good for (for some background on what a relational database is, see our guide to data terminology).

In a blog post at DBMS2, database veteran Curt Monash explains when it's still best to use a relational database.