What is big data and how big is BIG !
What is big data and how big is BIG!
As I said in my first post….I my early blog posts will focus upon “level setting” my readers in an attempt to bring people who are new to business intelligence environments up to speed. I will be defining terminology and focus on business intelligence users, workloads and the data which they analyze.
So, let's start with a discussion regarding one of the industry’s current hot buzz words, “Big Data”.
What is BIG DATA ?
The term “big data” can be very subjective.
After all, the word “big” to some may be “small” to others and vice versa.
The word “BIG” is relative…
In the past, people thought of big data as being things like phone call detail records, POS credit card transactions or stock/financial transactions. While these forms of data are truly “big”, today, many people think of big data as including RFID, web logs, social data, RSS feeds, eMail, XML, spreadsheets, audio, video, images, etc.
All of the above are examples of big data. Other examples, not mentioned above, will vary from customer to customer and from application to application.
Current industry thinking is that “big data” comes in 3 basic forms:
- Structured
- Semi-structured
- Unstructured
My next post will discuss each of these 3 forms of “big data” and future posts will explore ideas and best practices on converting big data into useful information.
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Through the course of my blog series I will discuss how the various HP Reference Architectures and Appliances will help you support your company’s BI requirements. The “What’s new” links, on the right side of the page, contain useful background information.
As usual, if any readers have thoughts or comments, please feel free to let me know :-)
Easy access links to my BLOG entries to create a comprehensive series of BI Best Practice and architecture ideas, here are the links:
1) Why spend time reading another blog on data business intelligence, data warehousing & analytics?
