4.11.1 Big Data

Question 1

What is Big Data?

Answer 1

a catch-all term for data that won’t fit the usual containers

Question 2

Why is the lack of structure of big data such an issue?

Answer 2

analysing the data is made significantly more difficult

relational databases are not appropriate because they require the data to fit into a row-and-column format.

Question 3

What is big data in terms of volume?

Answer 3

Volume: the sheer amount of data is on a very large scale, too big to fit into a single server. Size impacts when the data doesn’t fit onto a single server because relational databases don’t scale well across multiple machines

Question 4

What is big data in terms of variety?

Answer 4

Variety: the type of data being collected is wide-ranging, varied and may be difficult to classify. data in many forms such as structured, unstructured, text, multimedia

Question 5

What is big data in terms of velocity?

Answer 5

Velocity: the data changes quickly and may include constantly changing data sources, there may be a large degree of latency

Question 6

What happens when data is too big to fit on one server?

Answer 6

the processing must be distributed across more than one machine
functional programming is a solution, because it makes it easier to write correct and efficient distributed code because the code can run across multiple servers.

Question 7

What is structured / unstructured data?

Answer 7

Structured data - data that fit into a standard database structure of columns and rows (fields and records).

Unstructured data - data that doesn’t fit into a standard database structure of columns and rows (fields and records).