Big Data Analytics

What Does Big Data Analytics Mean?

Big data analytics refers to the strategy of analyzing large volumes of data, or big data. This big data is gathered from a wide variety of sources, including social networks, videos, digital images, sensors, and sales transaction records. The aim in analyzing all this data is to uncover patterns and connections that might otherwise be invisible, and that might provide valuable insights about the users who created it. Through this insight, businesses may be able to gain an edge over their rivals and make superior business decisions.

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Techopedia Explains Big Data Analytics

Big data analytics allows data scientists and various other users to evaluate large volumes of transaction data and other data sources that traditional business systems would be unable to tackle. Traditional systems may fall short because they’re unable to analyze as many data sources.

Sophisticated software programs are used for big data analytics, but the unstructured data used in big data analytics may not be well suited to conventional data warehouses. Big data’s high processing requirements may also make traditional data warehousing a poor fit. As a result, newer, bigger data analytics environments and technologies have emerged, including Hadoop, MapReduce and NoSQL databases. These technologies make up an open-source software framework that’s used to process huge data sets over clustered systems.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…