by Angela Guess
Rob Armstrong recently reminded data professionals that Big Data isn’t about the ‘big,’ it’s about the data. He writes, “It is a little amusing to those of us that have been in the data warehousing game a long time, especially with Teradata, to hear the term BIG DATA. At the start of Teradata, people openly wondered if anyone would ever have a need to handle a terabyte of data, and yet today there is talk of petabytes and beyond with hardly a blink of an eye.”
Armstrong continues, “Big data is not about volume, though it may certainly be voluminous. The accent is really on the second part, the data. The term applies to many new and varied data sources such as RFID, Geospatial, Smart meters, social network data, and web logs. Yes this data can be big but more importantly it provides a source of very rich analytical opportunity.”
He adds, “You can think of this is a few ways. There is data such as smart metering for a utility company. Getting a discrete usage tracking at 15 minute intervals will certainly cause much more data coming into the environment. As opposed to a once a month recording this would be approximately a 3000 times jump (96 a day for 30 days rather than a 1 row per month)! But the data is still the same structure and very “relationally friendly”. The data fits the existing model and can enable much better analytics that leads to network optimization, marketing new rates and services, and integration into home appliances. So here the data is big but easy to handle, provide you have the technology and scalable environment to allow that type of growth.”
photo credit: CharlieBaxterPhotography.com
