Reading: Big Data

Read the text and mark the sentences TRUE or FALSE.

According to IBM, 90 % of the data in the world today was created in 2012. As a civilization we have been creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. 2.5 quintillion bytes is approximately 2.5 billion gigabytes of data! Such massive sets of data are known as Big Data. Traditional databases were designed to analyze, manage and manipulate much smaller collections of data. Up until a few years ago most data was structured – easy to organize, process and manage. Big Data, however, goes beyond structured data. Due to our ever-increasing activity on social media the volume of collected information has increased significantly in recent years. Thus, Big Data includes unstructured data such as pictures, posts, audio and video files, sales transactions, medical records, GPS data and many more different types of files. In a word, Big Data refers to data sets which exceed the processing capacity of traditional databases.

Big Data is frequently characterized by the 3 V model:

volume – the amount of data

velocity – the speed at which data sets are produced, stored and manipulated

variability – the diversity of data i.e. different formats of data: structured, unstructured, semi-structured

Thanks to Big Data analytics enterprises can harness the collected information to get a better understanding of what their customers expect and thereby gain a competitive edge over their competitors.