James Livingston uses linear regression to plot database growth over time:
Utilizing the equation for a line, instead of solving for y we will solve for x, where:
– x corresponds to the day we will hit capacity based on current growth rate
– y corresponds to drive capacity in GB
– m is the slope of our regression line, provided by the model via lm.coef_
– b is the intercept of the regression line, also provided by the model via lm.intercept_
Click through for an example. This is one of the areas where DBAs can gain a lot by learning a bit of data science.