Big Data Analytics: where advanced analytic techniques operate on big data sets

Data is structured in multiple forms and it is the structure of data that allows applications to handle it automatically. Therefore, a search engine can search for words, propose completion of partially typed words, do spell check and suggest grammar corrections automatically. The world of big data will tremendously benefit from the hybrid big data platform and enables multi-structured data to be stored natively in the database. Therefore, we can store relational data as tables with rows and columns. Apart from the function of multi structured data to be stored in the database, it also enables them to be automatically interpreted natively in the database. For example, we can process the PDF data to retrieve various text blocks in that document and HTML pages to retrieve its content.

Big data analytics is the application of an advanced analytic technique to very large and diverse data sets that often includes varied data types and streaming data. It basically explores the granular details of business operations and customer interactions that seldom find their way into a data warehouse or a standard report which includes unstructured data coming from sensors, devices, third parties, web applications and social media. Much of it is sourced in real time on a large scale. By using advanced analytics platforms and techniques, such as predictive analytics, data mining, statistics and natural language processing, many of the business organizations can study big data to understand the current state of the business and track evolving aspects such as customer behavior.

New methods of working with big data analytics, such as Hadoop and MapReduce, also offer alternatives to traditional data warehousing. It is a fast growing and influential practice, but not many organizations are actually practicing it. Roughly when surveyed three quarters of organizations, it was found that they have adopted some form of analytics platform, regardless of the analytic method or tool type and also whether with big data or not. This reveals a strong adoption of advanced analytics, which isn’t a surprise, given that it’s been around for at least 15 years or so. Another important feature noted during this survey that around one-third of organizations do practice big analytics, although it is new. In other words, this depicts that they practice some form of advanced analytics and further apply it to big data. This shows a respectable presence for big data analytics while giving the newness of the combination of advanced analytics and big data.