Data’s Big, but just how Big?
Hands up anyone who’s exceeded 64Gb of music in their iTunes library (or other generic MP3 music service)? I’m guessing that it’s quite a lot of us.. Now, that’s a pretty big database of music. But what exactly is Big Data? How do you define Big Data? What has this got to do with a database about a dead East Coast rapper ? In short, it has nothing to do with Biggie Smalls but is actually a fairly loose definition that is being used to describe the growth in the amount of data produced and analysed by organisations, governments and individuals and the difficulties that are being encountered in storing, using and analysing these large datasets. There’s now a growing market for suppliers of data storage, networking and analysis tools such as IBM , Teradata and Google who have the experience and capability to make sense of all of this information about shopping habits, Facebook status’, DNA sequences and the movements of Galaxies or Higgs Bosons. To give you an id