Taming The Big Data Tidal Wave: Finding Opportunities in Huge Data Streams with Advanced Analytics (Wiley and SAS Business Series)

In the year 2000, an organization that had a database holding a terabyte of data was at the forefront. Today you can buy a terabyte disk drive for your computer for under $100!

RFID tags remove the need to manually log or inventory each item and allow a census to be taken much more rapidly.

Unstructured data sources are those that you have little or no control over. You are going to get what you get. Text data, video data, and audio data all fall into this classification. A picture has a format of individual pixels set up in rows, but how those

Code is written in the native language of such tools, but the software now recognizes when an MPP database engine is being accessed, and the software will pass through instructions to the database and let the database handle the heavy lifting instead of performing a large extract.

Ripple effects have occurred across industries as data sources, analytic methods, and scalability have matured. Retailers began loyalty programs to reward customers, and the resulting data has shifted the retail business from a product-centric one to a customer-centric one.

results. Without making the use of the analytics easy, the organization won’t leverage them to the full extent possible.

growing exception to the ubiquity of relational databases is unstructured data processed via a MapReduce paradigm, which we’ll cover later in the chapter in the section titled “MapReduce.”

at nine more sources of big data and some ways to use them.

One good example of this is the way that web activity tracking is done today. Most web sites use what is known as a tag-based methodology. With a tag-based methodology, it is necessary to identify up front what text, images, or links it is desired to track users’ interactions with.

Great analysis starts with framing the problem correctly. This includes assessing the data correctly, developing a solid analysis plan, and taking into account the various technical and practical considerations that are in play.