Sep 19, 2011

What is Big Data?

I've been hearing a lot about Big Data. What makes this any different than the large amounts of data we've been generating up to now?

Here's a good overview of big data for you, OldHippie.

Big data



What has happened is that fast multiprocessor servers and the explosion in the growth of servers has allowed us to build larger data sets in our data warehouses than our old tools and methodologies could handle, and getting results from this mountain of data has been like finding a needle in a haystack. What makes Big Data different is that if your business is using a modern database that's optimized for it, like Sybase, there are tools and techniques that make it much easier to drill down and find the specific information you need. For example, Sybase IQ 15.3's MPP (massively parallel processing) grid architecture basically allows a sharing of processing power, memory and access to data, so that a huge number of users can all perform some of their own analytics. This is a boon to productivity as we can now consider larger data sets to recognize long-term trends.

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