Big Data and why it’s Big
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“Big data is data of such volume, velocity, and variety that it cannot be handled in traditional relational database management systems.”
This is the direction our world is going — exponentially. We are creating and consuming mass amounts of data every day, every hour, every minute. Captured through cameras, search queries, social media posts, purchases, phone calls.
Some information is useful, but the question is, for what purpose? And what are you going to do with the knowledge that I was at Dairy Queen at 12:02am? And who’s they? The people that track my ice-cream expenditures?
“They” can be anyone. Companies that want to market to the right people, businesses that want to forecast their sales by tracking general ice-cream sales in Chicago — and yes — the NSA for the safety of the Country.
The point is, “they” can be anyone, because we have the capacity to track data, using SQL, and Apache Hadoop. And up until now, we haven’t had a BIG amount of data to play with.
The key words describing data are: “variety” and “unstructured.” With a big variety of unstructured data, it provides no useful information for whoever is using it.
“Variety: big data deployments are also characterized by high-variety data .”
“Unstructured data is characterized by its complete absensce of structure. It’s data that’s being generated everywhere, at all times — a natural by-product of peoples’ daily activities, from engagement with social media networks and RSS feeds, to the generation of office emails, Word documents, and PDF files.”
These two key words are why we have data analysts, and those privvy with finding patterns in large amounts of data.
These people are going to change the way the world works within the next decade, and completely rewrite the rules of business.
Sources about Big Data for the data analyst:
