Is Big Data Really Too Big To Be Called Data Only?

Is Big Data Really Too Big To Be Called Data OnlyCan we call big data just data? Of course we can because no matter how big the data is, it is still data. However, thinking of big data as you think of common data is not the best way of thinking about big data. It must not go without mentioning that the data we normally think about can be handled by databases that have been in use for several years but the same databases cannot handle big data. Big data is too big for small data handling softwares to handle it and its magnitude is increasing with time.

The best way to define big data is with 3 Vs. The 3 Vs stand for volume, velocity and variety. It is easy to understand why volume is one of the Vs. Of course, big data is called big data because it has a huge volume. The volume is increasing with time and is so big that commonly found data handling softwares will take an impractical length of time to process it. Think of the length of the total size of millions of videos that are uploaded to Youtube every day. Think of the size in a month and then a year.

Velocity talks about the speed at which the big data is produced. Every big data was once a small data but with time it grew big. Handling big data becomes a challenging task not only because of its size (i.e. volume) but due to its velocity as well. This data is produced at such a fast pace that storing it and processing the already stored data and taking the backup of existing one simultaneously becomes nearly impossible unless there is a big data handling software as robust and powerful as Hadoop. Lastly, variety is another big challenge of big data.

When we say big data we are not talking about simple and plain looking data with a column and a row defining the data. We are actually talking about data in forms that don’t fit into the columns and rows of the tables at all. This is referred to as unstructured data. Videos, audios and visual data are the examples of unstructured data and amazingly unstructured data is being produced at fastest pace. Cameras running in banks, pictures being uploaded on World Wide Web and comments left on Facebook and other similar social networking websites are all forms of unstructured data.

Big data is used for many different purposes. In fact, it would not be wrong to say that the foundation of future businesses will be set on the amount of data they will have and their intelligent use of that data. Marketing campaigns run by the largest enterprises of the world are based on the trends they have found from big data i.e. what country buys what product at what time the most. Another important use of big data is the prediction of business and growth possibilities for businesses based on the analysis done on data available from past.