How Big Is Big Data?
Digitization is rapidly increasing and so is the quantity of data, much of it coming from new sources including financial and retail transactions, web logs, RFID, sensor networks, social media, call detail records, eCommerce, medical records and more. In fact, the data sets are so big and complex that it becomes very difficult and challenging to process them using the traditional data processing applications. It should be noted here that about 80% of the total data is unstructured. For businesses, it is difficult to manage and store the large volume of data. Hence, some organizations have moved to strategize and utilize their approach with big data technologies. Big data represents next generation in data analytics and visualization.
This Big Data has 3 dimensions:
- Volume: Measured in terabytes or petabytes
- Variety: Structured and Unstructured Data
- Velocity: Rapidly Changing Data
However, recent studies have added two more components which describe Big Data
- Variability: At times, data flow is highly inconsistent with periodic peaks which hamper the process of handling and managing data effectively.
- Complexity: As large volumes of data come from multiple sources, data management becomes a challenging task.
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