What is Big Data
Biswajyoti Kar
[email protected]
Every day we create about few quintillion bytes of data. 90% of the data in the world today has been created in
the last 2 to 3 years alone. The sudden burst in growth of data can be attributed to: posts to social media sites,
digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, cell phone GPS signals, sensors used to gather climate
information to name a few. This data is BIG DATA.
BIG DATA is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand
database management tools or traditional data processing applications thus it outgrows your current ability to
process it, store it, and cope with it efficiently.
BIG DATA is 4D in IT spatial: Size, Acceleration, Form, Accuracy (SAFA)
Size does matter after all.
Sometimes big data is measured in terabytes, petabytes, exabyte, zettabyte or more. In real word, it's usually
measured in frustration, annoyance, anxiety, and money down the drain. The challenges include capture,
curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization. The trend to larger data sets is due to the
additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate
smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends,
determine quality of research, prevent diseases, legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway
traffic conditions
Acceleration
For time critical processes such as fraud detection in trade events, predict customer churn etc. BIG DATA must
be used as it flows into your enterprise in order to maximize it's value. It's just not a race against time rather to
derive potential insights that provides innovative ways of doing things.
Form
BIG DATA is varied type of data - structured and unstructured data such as text, video, audio, sensor data, click
streams, log files and much more. New insights are found when these data types are analyzed together.
Accuracy
1 in 3 business leader do not trust the information they use to make decisions. How can one act upon information
that they don't trust. Establishing trust in BIG DATA presents a huge challenge and the variety and number of
source grows.
BIG DATA is more than simply a matter of size; it is opportunity to find insights in new and emerging types of
data and content.
Analytics Brio 11