What Is "Big Data"? What Are Its Characteristics And Uses?

With the increasing popularity of Internet information age, "big data" has emerged as the most popular word in the IT industry nowadays. What is "big data"? What are its characteristics and uses?

It is a collection of data that can not be crawled, managed and processed by conventional software tools within a certain period of time.

Big data technology refers to the ability to get valuable information quickly from all kinds of data.

Technologies for large data, including large-scale parallel processing (MPP) database, data mining grid, distributed file system, distributed database, cloud computing platform, Internet, and extensible storage system.

Four characteristics of big data

It is reported that big data (Big Data) refers to "massive, complex data sets that can not be extracted, stored, searched, shared, analyzed and processed by existing software tools."

The industry usually uses 4 V (i.e. Volume, Variety, Value, Velocity) to summarize the characteristics of big data.

The first is the huge volume of data (Volume).

Up to now, the data volume of all printed materials produced by human beings is 200PB (1PB=210TB), and the amount of data spoken by all people in the history is about 5EB (1EB=210PB).

At present, the capacity of typical personal computer hard disk is TB, and the data of some large enterprises are close to the magnitude of EB.

The two is the wide variety of data (Variety).

This type of diversity also allows data to be divided into structured and unstructured data.

Compared with the structured data that is easy to store in text, there are more and more unstructured data, including web logs, audio, video, pictures, geographically located information, etc. these multiple types of data have higher requirements for data processing capability.

The three is low value density (Value).

The density of value is inversely proportional to the total amount of data.

Take video as an example, a 1 hour video can only be one or two seconds in continuous monitoring.

How to achieve the value of data more quickly through powerful machine algorithms has become a problem demanding prompt solution under the background of big data.

The four is fast processing speed (Velocity).

This is the most salient feature of big data distinguished from traditional data mining.

According to IDC's "Digital Universe" report, it is estimated that by 2020,

The usage will reach 35.2ZB.

In the face of such huge amounts of data, the efficiency of data processing is the life of an enterprise.

The use of "big data"

First, the processing and analysis of big data is becoming the node of the new generation of information technology integration application.

The Internet of things, social networking, digital home, e-commerce and so on are the new generation of information technology applications, these applications continue to produce big data.

Cloud computing provides storage and computing platform for these massive and diverse big data.

Through the management, processing, analysis and optimization of data from different sources, the results will be returned to the above applications, which will create enormous economic and social values.

Big data has the power to spawn social change.

But releasing this energy requires rigorous data management, insightful data analysis and an environment for stimulating management innovation (Ramayya Krishnan, Dean of Heinz college, Carnegie Mellon University).

Second, big data is a new engine for sustained growth of the information industry.

New technologies, new products, new services and new formats will emerge in the big data market.

In the field of hardware and integrated devices, big data will have an important impact on the chip and storage industry, and will also lead to the integration of data storage processing servers, memory computing and other markets.

In the field of software and services, big data will lead to data processing, data mining and software development.

Third, the use of big data will become a key factor in improving core competitiveness.

Decisions in all walks of life are changing from "business driven" to "data driven".

The analysis of big data can enable retailers to grasp market dynamics and respond quickly. It can provide decision support for businesses to develop more precise and effective marketing strategies; it can help enterprises provide more timely and personalized services for consumers; in the medical field, it can improve diagnostic accuracy and drug effectiveness; in the field of public utilities, big data also play an important role in promoting economic development and maintaining social stability.

Fourth, there will be significant changes in the methods and methods of scientific research in the era of big data.

For example, sampling survey is the basic research method of social science.

In the era of big data, we can excavate and analyze the massive behavior data generated by the Internet on the basis of real-time monitoring and tracking, revealing the regularity of things, and putting forward research conclusions and countermeasures.