Blog – Big Data

What is Big Data?

Simply put, big data is any VOLUMINOUS DATA (from terabytes to petabytes) that cannot be adequately analyzed using the traditional data management techniques and warehousing.

Referencing the article “What is Big Data”, at the beginning of the information age, big data seemed to aptly describe the technological, cultural and economic shifts of the new millennium (early 2000s).

In this new age, data is digitally sourced, stored, manipulated and analyzed for business purposes and whatever impact it is needed to play in any situation or system.

The new digital data authenticated what theorists referred to as the three V’s

• • Variety – Data comes in varieties of structure. Can also be heavily unstructured
  • Velocity – Numbers come in fast and can be processed very quickly. Availability of real-time processing using analytics and data mining tools.
  • Volume – abundance of data, the term big data is associated with volume and size of data that cannot be easily analyzed using the traditional data management methodologies.

As large datasets commonly have some missing values, knowing the right techniques and steps (imputation and handling outliers) to take in ensuring they do not have an adverse effect on quality is important.

The Big Tech Giants FAANG now MAANG are huge case study of Big Data domination in the information technology industry. How they manage and improve on such voluminous data is outlined as a practical use case.

Take for instance, Amazon. The retail giant deals with massive amount of customer and logistic data. it is important to have a system to manage that data. the organization currently has several data storage services and it uses BIG DATA to manage such voluminous data. Of course, Amazon’s platform AWS provides multiple services and tools for big data analytics. In most cases, big data processing involves a common data flow – from collection of raw data to consumption of actionable information.

Reference:

Schmarzo, B. (2013). Big data. Amazon. Retrieved February 4, 2022, from https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/what-is-big-data/