Info 202 Fall 2011

The amount of  the stored data has increased exponentially which can hold lot of value. A proper
usage of this data can help anybody run a very profitable business. The article
by computer world describes this kind of data as “big data”. Computer world
defines big data as the mining of huge sets of structured and unstructured data
for useful insights. According to IBM, classify data as big data it has to meet
three criteria; first variety means data comes in structured and unstructured
forms. Second volume means the amount of data being gathered and analyzed is
very large and third velocity refers to the speed at which the data is
processed.

Initially, the primary users of the big data were the web companies like yahoo, google
that wanted to analyze the click stream of their users. However, other
companies in areas such as banks, utilities, companies dependent on the social
media are increasingly using the big data as they are releasing the importance
of this data in revolutionizing their business by understanding the consumer
behaviour. Since “Big data” is huge and complex data, companies are
increasingly looking at new database technologies such RDBMS. One of the recent
developments for processing these large sets of data is Hadoop. Hadoop
framework allows for distributed processing of the large data using simple
programming models.

The companies which use technology to run their business are increasingly becoming technology
savvy and are adopting new frameworks like Hadoop not only to manage their data
but also to make sense of what that data means to them.

The article talks about how companies are realizing the importance of the consumer data in
driving their business. This data can provide value to them when organized in a
proper. Most part of the article provides examples of how different companies
have expanded their business by using emerging technologies in database management.
In the end the author also mentions about the need to make this nascent
technologies to be user friendly as the companies adopting them may not be
technology savvy.

Reference:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/357092/Why_Big_Data_Is_a_Big_Deal?taxonomyId=9&pageNumber=1