What is Big Data and its Types?
Till the end of 20th century, most of the data generated by the businesses was structured data. But, in present era, 80% of unstructured and semi structured data are being generated. The traditional tools and technology were not able to store and process unstructured data. Therefore, the concept of Big Data is emerged.
What is big data?
The term Big Data describes to a massive volume of data that cannot be stored and processed by the traditional data storage / processing systems. These Days, data is generated at a rapid pace and in huge volume. It is being used by businesses to process and analyze to uncover hidden patterns and discover useful insights which add values to the business.
Types of Big-Data
Big Data is commonly classified into three different categories.
- Structured Data
- Semi-Structured Data
- Unstructured Data
Structured Data is characterized by the well-defined structure or schema. It follows a set of rules and constraints. Structured data usually consists of well-defined columns and stored in databases. The popular storage and processing system is called Database Management System (DBMS) or Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) such as MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 etc.
Semi-Structured Data is another form of structure data which follows only few characteristics of structured data and it does not comply with the formal structure of RDBMS data model. But the semi-structured data is also popular and useful in data processing such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Comma Separated Values (CSV) file etc.
Unstructured data is completely undefined which means it does not follow any schema of formal data models. These type of data does not have any consistent format or fixed format. The commonly used unstructured data is image, audio, and video files.
