A conspiracy theory. How many recurrent events Google Calendar actually creates when you choose the option “Ends: Never”?
I have a very important Big Data question. Have you ever asked yourself, how many recurrent events Google Calendar actually creates when you choose the option “Ends: Never”? 😳
Why is this question so important? First of all, every single event is a row in a database. And there’s no actual “never” because the number of database rows is not infinite.
It is clear that Google Calendar cannot physically pre-generate billions of meetings:
a) It is waisting of databases space,
b) Most of these meetings won’t happen anyway,
c) If the recurrent event is canceled for whatever reason, all the pre-generated events need to be removed or most probably be marked as “removed”.
So how many then? As an example, I choose our regular weekly Datamin’s all-hands meeting, which takes place every Monday and was created by myself in November 2021.
I see it in my calendar until the end of this year, but if I select, for example, August 2100, it is not in there anymore. 😱
So, when does it actually end? To make this post more scientific, I was using a manual implementation of the “Bisection method” 😁 and figured out that the last occurrence of this event is in November 2035. Meaning, that Google Calendar pre-generated 14 years of events.
But now even if we know the number, we still don’t know the answers to many other questions:
- Why 14 years? Is there any specific reason to choose this number?
- What will happen afterward? Will Google generate more meetings if it sees that it actually keeps taking place?
And to finish this post more dramatically, let’s add more mystery and conspiracy theories. Since Google knows so much about every single of us, could it be that these 14 years are based on their estimation of either the company’s lifetime or the lifetime of a meeting’s organizer? 😱
If it is true, you better check when your recurrent events end.
