Question of the day - What is BIG DATA and why is it such a big deal?

Welcome to yet another series of MTGQOTD (My Techie Guy Question Of The Day) and today's question is BIG DATA. We shall start with the basic definition of BIG DATA, and i tried to list a few versions of the definition from different sources but they pretty much mean the same thing.

What is BIG DATA?

Source 1: Google

"Big data" is extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.

Source 2: SAS

“Big data” is a term that describes the large volume of data – both structured and unstructured – that inundates a business on a day-to-day basis. But it’s not the amount of data that’s important. It’s what organizations do with the data that matters. Big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves.

Source 3: Tech Target

“Big data” is an evolving term that describes any voluminous amount of structured, semistructured and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information.

Source 4: Webopedia

“Big Data” is a phrase used to mean a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data that is so large and difficult to process using traditional database and software techniques. In most enterprise scenarios the volume of data is too big or it moves too fast or it exceeds current processing capacity.

Source 5: Oracle

“Big data” describes a holistic information management strategy that includes and integrates many new types of data and data management alongside traditional data.

Big data is well defined by 4Vs:

Volume – Big data is associated with humongous amounts of data.

Velocity – Data streams in at fast rate and also needs to be processed at a fast rate.

Variety – Data comes in all types of formats; structured, numeric, semi-structured and unstructured data types such as text, audio, video, email, images etc

Value – Using analytic tools and data mining techniques, data is analysed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves, and that’s the intrinsic value of data.

So why is big data a big deal?

In a world where everything is or will be connected (IoT), data will be the driving force and this will not depend on just how much data you gather but also on what you do with it. Big data combined with powerful analytic tools and techniques will be used to find answers to real life problems, for example:

1.   Reduce on the costs of production

2.   Reduce on the time and its associated costs

3.   Market driven product development

4.   Smart decisions based on facts

Basically, the gold of the digital age is “data” and the giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook are already mining it and cashing in, no wonder they are the top most valuable listed companies in the world and they collectively bagged $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017 ... Continue reading