Big Data. Small World.

As IT companies visit various educational institutes for recruitment and internships across the country, a topic which has come to light to engineering students is of Big Data. Most of us, might be unaware of the terminology but the concept is more or less familiar to us.

Big Data could be thought of as an advanced and better-equipped version of a database. We know that database is a collection of data for a particular system, online or offline. The commonly accepted definition of it as coined by a consensus of IT companies is, ‘a constitution of unstructured stuff.’



Though Big Data is not limited to just serving the purpose of a repository. It amasses concepts related to Data Mining, Distributed Computing and use of data to uncover trends that can benefit one’s business. A very direct application of it is social networking sites. Social networking sites use Big Data to study their customer behaviour and hence provide personalized service. Apart from that, organizations like U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have found Big Data to be useful in approaching climate, weather and research operations.

The major Big Data issue right now is the storage of the huge amount of information and its safekeeping. Another issue is the violation of privacy that could be a result of Data Mining. Remember Google?
Big Data, despite of its challenges, has been a very useful development in the field of IT and I think it is here to stay. For a deeper look into the construct, you could refer O’Reilly’s ‘Big Data Now’ which was recently published or for a shorter version, watch Jameson Toole TED talk on ‘Big Data Tomorrow.’



Image Credit: Big Data Is Less About Size, And More About Freedom • TechCrunch