Hello Big Data Enthusiast,
Many of you would have heard about this term "Big Data" getting buzzed out everywhere and wondering what it could be.
Ok, let's sort out things with an example.
Imagine you have a machine with a capacity of 8 GB storage, and you want to store a data of size 12 GB from a client and perform some analytics on it. So, think of the possible ways in which you can store the desired data.
1. Extend your HD capacity to around 15GB or beyond for a succesfull storage.
2. Hire a cloud serivce and upload the data in cloud for analysis, but if the client don't want to upload the data into cloud due to multiple reasons, then this option will be ruled out.
3. Upload the data into a distributed file system, after analysing it pro's and con's.
True, you can follow any one of the above mentioned cases.
This data of 12GB size which is beyond the machine storage capacity is actually called as BIG DATA.
This BIG DATA can be in any format/type like structured,unstructured and semistructured.
Structured - RDBMS data(table data with proper rows,columns,keys etc..)
Unstructured - Images, Pictures ,Videos etc.
Semistructured - Files of format HTML,XML etc.
A data can be big data to you and not necessarily be a big data to other person.
Seems confusing..., giong back to the previous example, if you have have machine of 20 GB storage capacity, you can conveniently store our 12GB and it is not a big data for you at first place.
Hope now have you climbed up a little, on the mountain of Big data!!..
Big data can also be defined in other way if it satisifies the below criterias.
Volume
If the size of the data you are planning to analyse, is much bigger than the capacity of your machine, then call it as a big data.
Velocity
If the rate or speed of the data entering into your machine increases exponentially with respect to time , then call it as a big data.
Variety
The data could be in any formats like Structured,Unstructured,Semi-structured as we have seen previously.
Veracity
The data that we are going to process can contain some uncertain information or incorrect data.
Value
The data should makes some sense to the business, that is we should be able to make some analysis out of the data.
Now cooking up all of the above information, you can keep your first step into learning Big data.
We will see more insights about this on our next lesson.
Thank you!!