Are You Ready For Big Data. By Roopal Bhatia

Are You Ready for Big Data? By Roopal Bhatia | Submitted On February 10, 2011 Recommend Article Article Comments Print Article Share this article on Facebook Share this article on Twitter Share this article on Google+ Share this article on Linkedin Share this article on StumbleUpon Share this article on Delicious Share this article on Digg Share this article on Reddit Share this article on Pinterest There is a lot of buzz around Big Data and the NOSQL movement these days and rightly so. The issues with data have essentially been two-fold: find cost effective ways to store ever increasing amounts of data and information, and find ways to mine this information to extract meaningful Business Intelligence. This problem has been†¦show more content†¦Try performing a join between two database instances and you will know what I am talking about. To solve these issues, there are custom solutions from vendors like Teradata and Netezza. The barrier for entry is still quite high in adopting these systems, however, both in terms of license fees and setup and maintenance costs. There is an alternative. We are now in the era of framework-based DW, DIY DW and DW in the Cloud. The current set of tools and technologies that have emerged have helped democratize this domain which was for long the exclusive preserve of a few select vendors. The revolution was led by grid-based implementations adopted by the leading players like Google (Bigtable), Facebook (Cassandra) and Yahoo (Hadoop). Hadoop has emerged as one of the most popular Map/Reduce based open source frameworks for Big Data and several Information majors have adopted this technology. Beware that this is a framework and may need significant amounts of customization and programming to get it to do what you want. If Hadoop is not your cup of tea, then there are similar implementations like AsterData and GreenPlum which work on the same concepts but can get you up and running very quickly with their own abstractions libraries like SQL-MR and intelligent dashboards for easy configuration and maintenance. Another very appealing feature of these offerings is their ability to be hosted in a Cloud so all your