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What is BIG DATA? Introduction, Types, Characteristics,

Example
Before we go to introduction to Big Data, you first need to know

What is Data?
The quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer,
which may be stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals and recorded on
magnetic, optical, or mechanical recording media.

Now, let's learn Big Data introduction

What is Big Data?

Big Data is a collection of data that is huge in volume, yet growing exponentially with time. It is
a data with so large size and complexity that none of traditional data management tools can
store it or process it efficiently. Big data is also a data but with huge size.

In this tutorial, you will learn,

What is Data?
What is Big Data?
Examples Of Big Data
Types Of Big Data
Characteristics Of Big Data
Advantages Of Big Data Processing
 (/images/Big_Data/061114_0759_WhatIsBigDa1.jpg)

Examples Of Big Data

Following are some of the Big Data examples-

The New York Stock Exchange generates about one terabyte of new trade data per day.
 (/images/Big_Data/061114_0759_WhatIsBigDa2.jpg)

Social Media

The statistic shows that 500+terabytes of new data get ingested into the databases of social
media site Facebook, every day. This data is mainly generated in terms of photo and video
uploads, message exchanges, putting comments etc.

(/images/Big_Data/061114_0759_WhatIsBigDa3.jpg)

A single Jet engine can generate 10+terabytes of data in 30 minutes of flight time. With many
thousand flights per day, generation of data reaches up to many Petabytes.
 (/images/Big_Data/061114_0759_WhatIsBigDa4.jpg)

Types Of Big Data

Following are the types of Big Data:

1. Structured
2. Unstructured
3. Semi-structured

Structured
Any data that can be stored, accessed and processed in the form of fixed format is termed as a
'structured' data. Over the period of time, talent in computer science has achieved greater
success in developing techniques for working with such kind of data (where the format is well
known in advance) and also deriving value out of it. However, nowadays, we are foreseeing
issues when a size of such data grows to a huge extent, typical sizes are being in the rage of
multiple zettabytes.

Do you know? 1021 bytes equal to 1 zettabyte or one billion terabytes forms a zettabyte.

Looking at these figures one can easily understand why the name Big Data is given and imagine
the challenges involved in its storage and processing.

Do you know? Data stored in a relational database management system is one example of

a 'structured' data.

Examples Of Structured Data

An 'Employee' table in a database is an example of Structured Data

Employee_ID  Employee_Name  Gender  Department  Salary_In_lacs

2365  Rajesh Kulkarni  Male  Finance 650000

3398  Pratibha Joshi  Female  Admin  650000

7465  Shushil Roy  Male  Admin  500000

7500  Shubhojit Das  Male  Finance  500000

7699  Priya Sane  Female  Finance  550000

Unstructured
Any data with unknown form or the structure is classified as unstructured data. In addition to
the size being huge, un-structured data poses multiple challenges in terms of its processing for
deriving value out of it. A typical example of unstructured data is a heterogeneous data source
containing a combination of simple text files, images, videos etc. Now day organizations have
wealth of data available with them but unfortunately, they don't know how to derive value out
of it since this data is in its raw form or unstructured format.

Examples Of Un-structured Data

The output returned by 'Google Search'

(/images/Big_Data/061114_0759_WhatIsBigDa5.png)

Semi-structured
Semi-structured data can contain both the forms of data. We can see semi-structured data as a
structured in form but it is actually not defined with e.g. a table definition in relational DBMS
(/what-is-dbms.html). Example of semi-structured data is a data represented in an XML file.

Examples Of Semi-structured Data

Personal data stored in an XML file-

<rec><name>Prashant Rao</name><sex>Male</sex><age>35</age></rec>
<rec><name>Seema R.</name><sex>Female</sex><age>41</age></rec>
<rec><name>Satish Mane</name><sex>Male</sex><age>29</age></rec>
<rec><name>Subrato Roy</name><sex>Male</sex><age>26</age></rec>
<rec><name>Jeremiah J.</name><sex>Male</sex><age>35</age></rec>

Data Growth over the years

(/images/1/big-

data-growth.jpg)

 Please note that web application (/difference-web-application-website.html) data, which is

unstructured, consists of log files, transaction history files etc. OLTP systems are built to work
with structured data wherein data is stored in relations (tables).

Characteristics Of Big Data

Big data can be described by the following characteristics:

Volume
Variety
Velocity
 Variability

(i) Volume – The name Big Data itself is related to a size which is enormous. Size of data plays a
very crucial role in determining value out of data. Also, whether a particular data can actually
be considered as a Big Data or not, is dependent upon the volume of data. Hence, 'Volume' is
one characteristic which needs to be considered while dealing with Big Data.

(ii) Variety – The next aspect of Big Data is its variety.

Variety refers to heterogeneous sources and the nature of data, both structured and
unstructured. During earlier days, spreadsheets and databases were the only sources of data
considered by most of the applications. Nowadays, data in the form of emails, photos, videos,
monitoring devices, PDFs, audio, etc. are also being considered in the analysis applications.
This variety of unstructured data poses certain issues for storage, mining and analyzing data.

(iii) Velocity – The term 'velocity' refers to the speed of generation of data. How fast the data is
generated and processed to meet the demands, determines real potential in the data.

Big Data Velocity deals with the speed at which data flows in from sources like business
processes, application logs, networks, and social media sites, sensors, Mobile (/mobile-
testing.html)devices, etc. The flow of data is massive and continuous.

(iv) Variability – This refers to the inconsistency which can be shown by the data at times, thus
hampering the process of being able to handle and manage the data effectively.

Benefits of Big Data Processing

Ability to process Big Data brings in multiple benefits, such as-

Businesses can utilize outside intelligence while taking decisions

Access to social data from search engines and sites like facebook, twitter are enabling
organizations to fine tune their business strategies.

Improved customer service

Traditional customer feedback systems are getting replaced by new systems designed with Big
Data technologies. In these new systems, Big Data and natural language processing
technologies are being used to read and evaluate consumer responses.
 Early identification of risk to the product/services, if any
Better operational efficiency

Big Data technologies can be used for creating a staging area or landing zone for new data
before identifying what data should be moved to the data warehouse (/data-
warehousing.html). In addition, such integration of Big Data technologies and data warehouse
helps an organization to offload infrequently accessed data.

Summary

Big Data definition : Big Data is defined as data that is huge in size. Bigdata is a term used to
describe a collection of data that is huge in size and yet growing exponentially with time.
Big Data analytics examples includes stock exchanges, social media sites, jet engines, etc.
Big Data could be 1) Structured, 2) Unstructured, 3) Semi-structured
Volume, Variety, Velocity, and Variability are few Big Data characteristics
Improved customer service, better operational efficiency, Better Decision Making are few
advantages of Bigdata

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