What is Big Data?

Big Data

For many businesses, data is the 'currency of the future' and an essential element to remain competitive, expand their business and become a leader in their industry sector.

Storing, processing and decision-making based upon massive amounts of data requires a paradigm shift in terms of the technologies. No longer can we rely on centralized relational databases where storage and processing is done in one single location. So, instead of bringing data together, we keep the data distributed and bring the computation to where the data is.

Big Data technologies are at the core of all major internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn and others. New and emerging technologies, like the Internet of Things (IoT), will require Big Data applications to analyse vast amount of data collected from diverse device types.

Hadoop is the very popular leading Big Data technology. Due to its popularity, you will find Big Data and Hadoop being referenced interchangeably in the context of distributed storage and processing of large amount of data.

Hadoop has two core components: MapReduce Framework and Hadoop File System (HDFS). There are many applications and distributed databases built upon these core components. The key concept to remember is that Big Data is not a single technology, but is an ecosystem of a number of technologies combined together for the purpose of storing, analyzing and reporting on extremely large amounts of distributed data.