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back to article Who cares about Big Data

“Big Data” today clearly rules the web pages as market makers promote the topic at the drop of a hat. But with so much effort, and money, being spent promoting BD, is anyone actually doing anything in everyday businesses to exploit this loosely grouped family of technologies? Most readers of The Register acknowledge there are …

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  1. Britt Johnston
    IT Angle

    example of cross-consolidation of data domains

    http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ is a database that makes me cringe. The data is clearly manually driven, and incomplete. A larger data scope, which could include data from university rolls, and publications, would stabilise the original concept and increase the usefulness of all areas.

    Is anybody looking for a Friday research project?

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who cares about Big Data?

    Data's wife, I expect.

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  3. Nate Amsden

    how about defining it first

    what is big data? how big is big ?

    I know some folks who claim be "big data" people but operate on only a few TBs worth of data.

    Is big data more about say structured vs unstructured data rather than the volume of data? If you have a 5 node hadoop cluster with 50GB of data does that mean your running big data? How about how much active data vs inactive data ? You may have 600TB of data but maybe 95% of the jobs only operate on the most recent 5TB.

    Perhaps big data is data that doesn't fit in a traditional old school SQL database? (there are of course mostly SQL compliant databases that can operate on massive amounts of data pretty easily).

    From what I've heard the MySQL sharding system backed with FusionIO at facebook stores quite a bit of data, is that big data?

    what is big data?!

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: how about defining it first

      Big Data is what people who lack the intellect to understand what a schema is (never mind deduce and implement one reflecting reality) "do" because they are not smart enough to know how to do anything better.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: how about defining it first

        It's not purely about the volume of data, but the time in which that data has to be processed and useful information extracted.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: how about defining it first

      Well, it means way more data than you ever thought you needed before.

      But really 'Big Data' to me means an attitude that a company has : grab everything you can possibly know/find out about the environment in which you operate, and then employ expensive consultants to trawl through it to give you the nuggets of wisdom on which your business's future will depend.

      As opposed to employing people with a bit of intelligence and experience in your field, and having a strategic vision.

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