We’re sure that you have been hearing the term ‘Big Data’ and analytics everywhere the last few years. Some of you may know what it is, while others may just have a vague idea. We’re here to give you a brief introduction to Big Data – what it is, what makes it important and how it impacts you.
Introducing Big Data
The word itself may seem self-explanatory: big data refers to the different ways / methods and technologies that you can use to collect, collate, process and analyze very large sets of data. The issues of having to work with data sets that exceed the computing power of singular computers is not a new one, but the scale of it these days is.
Many different big data professionals use different terms to define what is big data so it’s not exactly easy to nail down the definition. In general though, when we talk about big data, we are referring to huge datasets and the strategies and types of technologies that we can use to work with those aforementioned data sets. Since the term ‘large datasets’ might differ for each person, we would refer to large dataset as one that is too big for your typical single computer to process or store.