by Angela Guess
Graeme Philipson recently wrote, “I got into a bit of a discussion with a friend of mine recently about this. I said big data is nothing special – data has been expanding exponentially since the beginning of time (which was about 1950), and what we are now calling big data is simply a continuation of this trend. Not so, said my friend. Big data is not just quantitatively different, it is qualitatively different, which means it needs to be treated and analysed in different ways.”
Philipson goes on, “Big data is unstructured, he pointed out. It often needs to be analysed in real time, and it cannot be handled by existing data management tools like relational databases and data mining or business intelligence. We ended up agreeing that we were not really in disagreement, and that we were both right. Yes, big data is a logical extension of the sorts of increases in data that we have always seen. But yes, this growth is so massive that we simply cannot approach data analytics in the same way we have in the past.”
