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You need to think big when you think about eBay Inc.'s auction and shopping website; for example, picture 100 million site users, 300 million active items, 50,000 product categories and an average of $2,100 worth of goods sold every second. The same applies if you think of eBay as a data management and business analytics company: It generates 50 terabytes of data a day and supports efforts to analyze that data by 7,500 business users and analysts. Data sandboxes, on the other hand, sound pretty small. But they're a key component of eBay's efforts to keep its data analysis processes from getting bogged down. "We can become swamped if people are asking for different views of the data -- different reports or dashboards," said Chris Rogaski, eBay's senior director of analytic application technology, during a presentation at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Los Angeles in April. "We needed to get ahead of that … so that our business analysts and product managers can make data-informed decisions." More on data sandboxes and...