Big Data

Question 1

What is big data?

Answer 1

Big data is a collection of large and complex data sets which are difficult to process using common database management tools or traditional data processing applications.

Question 2

What are the four dimensions (V’s) of Big Data

Answer 2

Volume, Variety, Veracity, Velovity

Question 3

What do the V’s imply?

Answer 3

Volume - Data at Rest (terabytes to exabytes of existing data to process)
Velocity - Data in Motion (Streaming data, milliseconds to seconds to respond)
Variety - Data in Many Forms (Structured, unstructured, text, multimedia)
Veracity - Data in Doubt (Uncertainty due to data inconsistency, incompleteness, ambiguity etc.)

Question 4

What does scaling mean?

Answer 4

Scaling is the ability of the system to adapt to increased demands in terms of processing

Question 5

What are the two types of scaling? What do they mean?

Answer 5

Horizontal Scaling
- involves distributing work load across many servers

Vertical Scaling
- involves installing more processors, more memory and faster hardware typically within a single server

Question 6

Name one advantage and one disadvantage of

a. horizontal scaling
b. vertical scaling

Answer 6

Horizontal

adv. - increases performance in small steps as needed
disadv. - limited no. of software are available that can handle horizontal scaling

Vertical

adv. - easy to manage and install hardware within a single machine
disadv. - requires substantial financial investment

Question 7

Give examples of horizontal and vertical scaling platforms.

Answer 7

Horizontal

• peer to peer networks
• apache hadoop
• apache spark

Vertical

• HPC
• multicore processors
• GPU

Question 8

What is the strategy that horizontal scaling focuses on?

Answer 8

Divide and Conquer Strategy
partition work in the beginning
let separate servers do the divided work
combine in the end for the result

Question 9

Which one is better? Horizontal or vertical scaling?

Answer 9

It highly depends on your requirements