What is Big Data
What is big data is a question often asked today and this article reveals some answers. The advances in computer technologies the last decade created the ability to create, store, and process large amounts of data. This also includes advances in networking that in turn enables to access the big data from physically distant locations over computer networks or the whole Internet. Apart from these advances there are often certain patterns or trends in this big datasets. It is not known exactly which customers are likely to buy a particular products or which author to suggest to customers who read books from other authors. If this would be known a big data processing and analysis would be not useful. But because this is not known a wide variety of valuable data is collected with the hope to extract answers to those questions.
Producers of big data include social media or a wide variety of data acquisition devices that are digital today and record not only reliable but also big data sets such as pictures with high resolutions. In addition supermarket chains with hundreds of stores all over a country sell thousands of goods to millions of customers today. Their sale terminals record the details of each transaction such as shopping data, customer identification code, products and goods bought and their amount, and the overall money spent as well. The high number of customers of movie rental companies rate movies and thus provide valuable data for other customers that aim to rent movies. Overall such data can easily grow and often amounts to gigabytes or terabytes of data created every day. All this stored big data becomes useful only when it is properly analyzed. In other words all the data needs to be turned into information that one can make use of such as making predictions of the future.
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