Big Data

Question 1

What is Big Data?

Answer 1

Large data sets that are too difficult to store on one server and too varied and complex to easily analyse

Question 2

What are the three qualities of Big Data?

Answer 2

Volume, velocity and variety

Question 3

What does volume mean in Big Data?

Answer 3

The gathering/storing of large amounts of data

Question 4

What does velocity mean in Big Data?

Answer 4

Data streams are collected in a near-to-real-time fashion making processing the data challenging.

Question 5

What does variety mean in Big Data?

Answer 5

Data comes in a wide variety of formats e.g. text, video, audio, image and unstructured or structured

Question 6

What is structured data?

Answer 6

• Data that can be entered into a relational database in a row and column format
• Data that can be analysed and queried

Question 7

What is unstructured data?

Answer 7

Data that is:

• Difficult to organise
• Not appropriate to store in a database in a row and column format
• Comes in a vast range of formats so is difficult to perform data analysis on.

Question 8

When is distributed programming used?

Answer 8

When data is too big to be processed on a single machine, the processing is distributed across several machines.

Question 9

What is a computer cluster?

Answer 9

Used in distributed programming to share the big data processing task.

Big Data –> Computer Cluster (Master Computer and computers) –> Client machines

Question 10

What does the master computer do?

Answer 10

It uses specialist software to control each networked computer as they perform their sub-tasks