Ben Lorica’s latest post on the O’Reilly Strata blog highlights the release of AMPLab’s BlinkDB approximate query processing system.   Ben suggests that BlinkDB may be the start of a movement towards the use of sampling to provide interactive analytics for ever-growing data sets.    We find the argument compelling, but have a look for yourself at: http://strata.oreilly.com/2013/08/interactive-big-data-analysis-using-approximate-answers.html