Chapter 2
Digging into the Essence of Big Data
In This Chapter
Exploring the four Vs of big data
Delving into the (justifiable) hype
Looking at today and into the future
Having picked up this book, you’ve likely already come across articles or blogs championing big data. You’ve heard some of the buzz and want to know why big data is such a big deal right now.
Data in itself isn’t a new business phenomenon. But big data is. And not all data is big data, even if there’s plenty of it. Don’t be alarmed, it gets easier!
The truth is, companies have had a lot of data for a long time – consider big mainframe computers and early data centres. Data in itself isn’t a new invention. Until recently, this data was limited to what’s called structured data (see Chapter 4), meaning it was typically in spreadsheets or databases. However, even though there was lots of it, this data wouldn’t count as big data because big data is defined by more than just how, well, big it is. As I show in this chapter, there are other factors that define big data.
For the purposes of this chapter, I talk strictly ...
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