4 Things You Should Know About Big Data

What is Big Data?

Big data refers to the collection of dataset that is too large, too fast and too difficult to store, process and manage. Any voluminous data may it be structured or unstructured with high velocity and variety of information can be termed as big data.  Such data needs to be processed quickly and typically represents petabytes or exabytes of data.

Large volumes of data analysis, capture, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, and information privacyis taken care by big data platforms.

Is it a technology or volume?

Though, the term big data seems to refer the volume, yet it is actually a revolutionary technology involving various tools and processes to handle the volume, velocity and variety of data facilitating efficient storage and processing capabilities.

The pro-active and connected world of mobiles and internet generates massive amount of data at a very high pace. This data may be either structured in the form of inventories, orders, and customer information or unstructured in the form of data fromweb and smart devices.The huge datasets so created are used to analyze and create business insights. Henceforth, it is substantial to store and process these huge datasets readily. Big data deals with the processing and storing of such huge datasets thereby enabling impeccable data analysis and useful business insights.

Big Data vs. Traditional Databases

Now the question is- why big data while since decades, we have been using our traditional databases for storing, processing and managing the data competently.

The HDBMs, NDBMS, OODBMS and most powerful RDBMs have been there for rescue when it came to data security and processing in efficient manners. But the waytechnology is evolving and generating data in various different forms at such a fast pace, the traditional databases fail to support big data.

Big data focuses more on continuous data flows and processing rather than existing data access unlike traditional data analytics.  Moreover, big data is capable enough to encompass all kinds of data may it be from web, social media web sites or even inventories.

Another prominent feature of big data is its cloud computing capabilities that enables users to store, access and manage data from anywhere anytime. This has made the business analytics more powerful and efficient thereby creating more useful and accurate business insights.

The platforms

Big data is available on many platforms to deal with voluminous data, such as 0xdata H2O, ClearStory, Cloudera, DataStax, Hortonworks, Hadoop, Platfora, Splice Machine, Splunkand Hunk, Sqrrl and many more. Yet, Hadoop, which is the part of Apache project, is the most talked about technology these days.

Our next blog will focus on the special features that make Hadoop most promising.