The Joy of Big Data

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The enterprise software landscape has shifted away from the big BI and RDBMS monoliths and toward startups with awesome new “Big Data” technology. These technologies could solve customer problems that were previously assumed to be unsolvable.

What is “Big Data”?

“Big Data” is a kind of annoying umbrella term for the various technologies designed to help companies understand and analyze the HUGE amounts of data they are now collecting and that are available from public sources.

It encompasses:

  • New breeds of massively parallel databases that can be split across dozens of independent machines (aka MPP databases)
  • Hadoop and MapReduce
  • NoSQL databases that give up some aspect of their relational database ancestors (such as joins, SQL-like languages, and/or transactions) to distribute data and processing over huge clusters of low-end machines.
  • The next generation of visualization tools to help users make sense of massive amounts of data
  • Heavy-duty data analysis, including predictive analytics and time-series analysis.