Читать книгу Big Data - Seifedine Kadry - Страница 41

The volume of data contributed by social media, mobile Internet, online retailers, and so forth, is massive and was beyond the handling capacity of traditional databases. This requires a storage mechanism that is highly scalable to meet the increasing demand. The storage mechanism should be capable of accommodating the growing data, which is complex in nature. When the data volume is previously known, the storage capacity required is predetermined. But in case of streaming data, the required storage capacity is not predetermined. Hence, a storage mechanism capable of accommodating this streaming data is required. Data storage should be reliable and fault tolerant as well.

Data stored has to be retrieved at a later point in time. This data may be purchase history of a customer, previous releases of a magazine, employee details of a company, twitter feeds, images captured by a satellite, patient records in a hospital, financial transactions of a bank customer, and so forth. When a business analyst has to evaluate the improvement of sales of a company, she has to compare the sales of the current year with the previous year. Hence, data has to be stored and retrieved to perform the analysis.