Folks, This is a brief summary of our Science meeting of February 4th.
Most of the discussion revolved around theoretical approaches for a relative-error quantiles sketch. There is certainly user interest in such a sketch if it could be practically implemented. Apparently, there are several research groups also interested in solving this problem, however, to date, there is not consensus on the best algorithmic approach nor is there consensus on what the theoretical error bounds would be. We did briefly discuss the possibility of re-creating a datasketches-experimental repository for algorithms like this that are still experimental and not ready for production. This would allow early adopters to experiment with the algorithms and provide feedback. We had such a repository in the github.com/datasketches organization, but as of yet have not seen the need to move it to Apache. If and when this new quantiles algorithm becomes available in the future it will be a good candidate to place in an experimental repository. Because this work is still preliminary and very early in development, there are no action items for the DataSketches engineering. Lee.
