What is Big Data Computing?

In the current digital landscape, data is produced whenever you use apps or browse on Google.  Consequently, this generates extensive pools of valuable information that companies and organizations manage, store, visualize, and analyze. This is where the idea of big data computing comes in, which deals with the computational vectors of large sets of data. 

In this article, you will explore the challenges, benefits, and management processes of big data. You will learn the history of big data, some popular big data computing tools and their key features.

What is Big Data?

Big Data encompasses vast and diverse sets of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data that expand exponentially. The complexity in volume, velocity, and variety (the “three Vs” of Big Data) surpasses the capabilities of conventional data management systems in terms of storage, processing, and analysis.

History of Big Data

Even though the concept of big data itself is relatively new, its roots go back to the 1960s and 1970s. It was around when the world of data was just getting started with the development of the first data centers and relational databases.

People started to discover how much data users created on Facebook, YouTube, and other websites no earlier than 2005. That same year, Hadoop, an open-source platform designed primarily to store and analyze large data collections, was established. It was around this period that NoSQL started to gain traction.

Big data has grown significantly through the development of open-source frameworks like Hadoop and, more recently, Spark, making big data easier to handle and less expensive to keep. Since then, the amount of big data has increased dramatically. Even now, users continue to produce enormous volumes of data, but they are not limited to humans.

Thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), more items and gadgets are now online, which collects information on consumer usage trends and product performance. Another source of data is the rise of machine learning.

Big data has come a long way, but its utility is only beginning. Cloud computing has broadened the potential for big data even more. The cloud provides true elastic scalability, allowing developers to easily spin up ad hoc clusters to test a subset of data. Graph databases are also gaining popularity due to their capacity to show enormous volumes of data in a form that allows for quick and complete analytics.

The Vs of Big Data

The pertinent characteristics of big data can be understood by its Vs. While there were three Vs of big data earlier, these days, an additional two Vs are used.

• Volume: Big data is primarily characterized by its significant volume. It encompasses vast amounts of data collected continuously from diverse sources.
• Velocity: The velocity of big data refers to the speed of its generation. Nowadays, data is often produced in real-time, demanding prompt processing, access, and analysis to be impactful.
• Variety: Big data encompasses diverse formats, such as structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data.
• Value: Assessing the business relevance of data is vital. Big data’s worth isn’t just in volume but in revealing insights crucial for decisions through effective analysis.
• Variability: Collected data constantly changes over time, causing inconsistencies. Context, interpretation, and collection method shift based on evolving business needs.

How Big Data Analytics Works

To obtain meaningful and relevant findings from big data analytics tools, data scientists and analysts require a strong understanding of the available data as well as the problem at hand. This makes data preparation tasks like profiling, validating, cleaning, and transforming data sets an important initial stage in the analytics process.

After the data has been collected and prepared for analysis, it can be used for various data science and analytics disciplines. These disciplines include machine learning, predictive modelling, statistical analysis, streaming analytics, data mining, and others.

Learn more about Big data Analytics here.

Big Data Challenges

Due to the sheer volume of data, big data faces some complex issues, such as:

Computation

Developing large-scale, distributed computer systems is crucial for efficiently handling extremely large data sets within a reasonable timeframe. The software has to split the data and computation across different parts of the system, fixing any errors that pop up.

Google’s MapReduce framework marked a significant advancement in organizing and programming these systems. Yet, there’s an ongoing need for more advanced techniques to fully realize the potential of big-data computing across various fields.

Data Storage

Transferring one terabyte of data within a cluster takes an hour or longer. This can take up to a day to complete over a typical high-speed internet connection. The bandwidth constraints further complicate the efficient utilization of computing and storage resources within a cluster.

Bandwidth limits also make it challenging to connect clusters in different places and move data between a cluster and a user. Consequently, the gap between the data that’s feasible to store and what can be effectively communicated will keep growing.

Security & Privacy

The abundance of data sets, potentially containing sensitive information, are prime targets for unauthorized access and misuse. Consequently, these datasets pose risks for security breaches and improper handling.

Quality of Data

Issues related to data quality significantly influence decision-making, computational data analytics, and strategic planning. Mere possession of big data doesn’t ensure outcomes unless the data is accurate and suitably organized for analysis. Failure to address this can impede reporting, leading to misleading results.

Big Data Management Process

It’s important to know how the big data management process works. There are three main steps in which big data is managed.

Integrate

Big Data gathers vast volumes, often reaching terabytes or even petabytes of raw data. This data undergoes reception, processing, and transformation to align with the formats required by business users and analysts for analysis.

Data is generally gathered and integrated using ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load). Hevo offers ETL services that help integrate data from over 150 sources with zero maintenance.

Management

Big data demands substantial storage, whether housed in the cloud, on-site, or a blend of both. This data necessitates storage in various formats and requires real-time processing and accessibility.

Companies are increasingly opting for cloud-based Data Warehouses and Data Lakes to leverage unlimited computing power and scalability.

Analytics

The last step involves analyzing and leveraging big data. It’s crucial to delve into the data and effectively communicate and disseminate insights across the entire business. This involves employing tools to craft data visualizations such as charts, graphs, and dashboards, ensuring comprehension and usability. Tools like Power BI, Python, etc, can perform these kinds of analytics.

Big Data Computing Benefits

Big data computing can create an array of benefits for your business. Here are some of the reasons why big data is so important.

Better Decision-Making

Big data computing supports the analysis of production, customer feedback, returns, and other elements to minimize disruptions and foresee future demands. This, in turn, enhances decision-making aligned with present market needs.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is gaining significant importance due to the role played by the availability of computing power. This extensive big data computing availability facilitates the training of machine learning models with billions of parameters.

Better Customer Experience

Analyzing large volumes of consumer data provides useful insights. This approach enhances consumer understanding, personalization, and optimization of experiences to better meet customer needs and expectations.

Increased Innovation

Big data allows for innovation by exploring connections among people, organizations, elements, and procedures. It helps discover fresh approaches based on insights. Using data insights aids in enhanced financial planning. It involves studying trends and understanding customer preferences to create new products and services.

Better Security

There is an entire team of skilled hackers that can steal your valuable data. Big data computing helps spot patterns in data that show fraud and gathers lots of information to make reporting to authorities quicker.

Big Data Use Cases

• Product development: Companies such as Netflix and Procter & Gamble use big data to predict client demand. They create predictive models for new products and services by categorizing key qualities from past and current products.
• Customer experience: Big data allows you to collect information from social media, online visits, call logs, and other sources to enhance the contact experience and maximize the value offered.
• Fraud and Compliance: Security landscapes and compliance needs are continuously changing. Big data enables you to spot trends in data that signal fraud and aggregate enormous amounts of information, making regulatory reporting considerably faster.

Popular Big Data Computing Tools

To properly harness the benefits of big data, you need tools that can effortlessly ingest huge volumes of data into your data warehouse for easier analysis. Here are some of the best tools through which you can integrate big data.

Hevo Data

Hevo facilitates data replication in real-time from over 150+ sources to various destinations, including Snowflake, Bigquery, Redshift, Databricks, etc. You can replicate data without writing a single line of code. Hevo guarantees zero data loss during rare occurrences of issues. It allows you to monitor your workflows, enabling the identification and resolution of potential issues before they disrupt the entire workflow.

 Some key advantages of Hevo are: 

• With Hevo, you can eliminate the need for manual maintenance whenever there are changes in the source data or API.
• You can automatically prepare data for analytics as soon as it reaches your data warehouse with Hevo’s pipeline. 
• Hevo streamlines integration into your data workflows. This allows you to execute pipeline actions without the necessity of visiting the dashboard through automated functionalities. 

APACHE Hadoop

Hadoop, a Java-centric open-source platform, is a robust repository and processor for extensive datasets. By employing a cluster framework, it facilitates efficient big data processing, leveraging parallel processing capabilities. Supporting structured and unstructured data, it allows seamless transfers of information from a single server to multiple machines.

Some key advantages of Hadoop are:

• Hadoop grants rapid accessibility through HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System).
• Remarkably adaptable, you can seamlessly integrate Hadoop with MySQL and JSON.
• Highly scalable, Hadoop distributes extensive data in small segments.

APACHE Spark

APACHE Spark is a tool for big data processing. Embraced by data analysts, it boasts user-friendly APIs enabling straightforward data retrieval. You can manage multi-petabytes of data efficiently with Spark.

Some key advantages of Spark are:

• Spark accommodates various programming languages like JAVA, Python, and more, enabling users to operate in their preferred language.
• You can seamlessly manage real-time streaming tasks through Spark streaming.
• It is adaptable across platforms such as Mesos, Kubernetes, or the cloud, offering flexible operational environments.

Qubole

Qubole stands as an open-source autonomous platform for managing vast amounts of big data. It seamlessly manages the installation, configuration, and maintenance of clusters. Qubole also offers specialized tools for tasks like data exploration, ad-hoc analytics, streaming analytics, and machine learning.

Some key advantages of Qubole are:

• Quobole reduces your computational costs through workload-aware autoscaling and real-time spot buying. 
• It delivers actionable insights, alerts, and guidance aimed at enhancing tool reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness.
• Quobole ensures high security and compliance standards for data handling.

MongoDB

MongoDB is a scalable NoSQL document database platform that is diverse from the traditional relational database approach. Handling documents instead of rigid tables allows the amalgamation of data from various sources into a structured format.

MongoDB also facilitates swift queries and retrieval of substantial data portions, addressing the computational complexities of big data analytics efficiently.

Some key advantages of MongoDB are:

• MongoDB enables users to conduct searches based on specific fields, perform range queries, and support regular searches.
• By operating across multiple servers, MongoDB facilitates data replication, ensuring continued functionality even in the event of hardware failures.
• Data distributed across multiple servers enables MongoDB to include an automatic load-balancing setup. This ensures an even distribution of database workloads among the servers, optimizing performance.

Conclusion

As we continuously try to innovate in this data-driven world, the need for more efficient utilization of data becomes paramount. With increasing data piles, a proper architecture is needed to eliminate the lingering problems associated with big data.

Without analyzing big data, proper innovation is not possible. For more valuable insights to elevate businesses, the proper study of big data becomes an absolute necessity. In this article, we have talked about the various challenges big data faces so that you can be careful while working with it. Understanding the management process, as discussed above, effectively coupled with using the right tools, is essential to harness the advantages of big data.

Learn more about Hevo

If you’re looking to integrate data on a single platform and make it analysis ready, consider using Hevo Data. With the range of readily available connectors, Hevo simplifies the data integration process; it’ll only take a few minutes to set up an integration and get started.

Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. Also check out the Hevo pricing to choose the best plan for your organization.

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