Big Data
What is big data and why is it important?
Big data refers to the massive amount of data (multiple exabytes worth) that a company creates over the course of it’s existence. This data may include all of the data that an organization may have stored in every single one of it’s data centers and computers. Examples of this are the huge amounts of data that an energy company can build up of geophysical data throughout the world or years of drug testing data for a pharmaceutical company. The sheer amount of volume of this big data would require too much time and money to analyze with normal relational databases.
Why should a company care about this big data? Organizations can use this unstructured data (which can account for more than 80% of the company’s data) to discover profitable, repeatable business patterns. By managing the vast amounts of big data, a company can also cut costs on digital storage by eliminating useless clutter within the storage units that have piled up over the years. Big data can also be important to a company that may need to refer to specific documents during a court case or government regulation inspections.
Where big data management has been applied
IBM provides a service to purchasing customers called “InfoSphere BigInsights” that helps gather and process this big data. They provided this service to Teikoku Databank. The company wanted to analyze the data on millions of companies that it owns along with big data from the internet. IBM deployed InfoSphere BigInsights to their servers. Now, in just half an hour, Teikoku Databank can process billions of items of textual data. This has caused Teikoku to be able to analyze 4.75 times more data for it’s customers.
How big data relates to topics learned about in MIS2502
In MIS2502, I learned about how analytical databases are used to analyze the data that is gathered and stored in operational databases. Analytical databases are used to discover trends and other useful information within sets of data to develop sales forecasts or seasonal tendencies. Big data management systems are one step above analytical databases due to the enormous amount of volume of data that must be processed.
Works Cited
Kusnetzky, Dan. “What Is “Big Data?”” ZDNet. CBS Interactive, 16 Feb. 2010. Web. 04 Apr. 2013.
Rouse, Margaret. “Big Data.” SearchCloudComputing. TechTarget, Mar. 2011. Web. 04 Apr. 2013.
“Teikoku Databank, Ltd.” IBM. N.p., 31 Mar. 2013. Web. 04 Apr. 2013.