Sparseness of data

Splunk is also excellent for dealing with sparse data. Much data in retailing environments is considered sparse. Consider a store that has many products but where most people just buy a few of them on any given shopping trip. If the store's database has fields specifying how many items of a particular type have been purchased by each customer, most of the fields would be empty if the time interval under consideration was short. We would say then that the data is sparse. In Splunk, the sparseness of data in a search ranges from dense (meaning that a result is obtained 10 percent of the time or more) to sparse (from 0.01 to 1 percent of the time). This can also extend to super sparse, or for a better definition, trying to find a needle in a haystack (which is less than 0.01 percent), and even to rare, which is just a handful of cases.