The Big Promise of 'Big Data' 78
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Frank Ohlhorst discusses how virtualization, commodity hardware, and 'Big Data' tools like Hadoop are enabling IT organizations to mine vast volumes of corporate and external data — a trend fueled increasingly by companies' desire to finally unlock critical insights from thus far largely untapped data stores. 'As costs fall and companies think of new ways to correlate data, Big Data analytics will become more commonplace, perhaps providing the growth mechanism for a small company to become a large one. Consider that Google, Yahoo, and Facebook were all once small companies that leveraged their data and understanding of the relationships in that data to grow significantly. It's no accident that many of the underpinnings of Big Data came from the methods these very businesses developed. But today, these methods are widely available through Hadoop and other tools for enterprises such as yours.'"
LiveSQL (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that the real innovation will be a variation of SQL that allows for the persistence of queries, such that they continue to yield new results as new data is found to match them in the database. If you have a database of a trillion web pages, and you continue to put more in, it doesn't make sense to re-scan all of the existing records each time you decide you need to get the results of the query again. It should be possible, and far more computationally efficient to have a stream of results from a LiveSQL query that can feed a stream, instead of batch mode.
I've registered the domain name livesql.org as a first step to helping to organize this idea and perhaps set up a standard.
Why it works for Google/Yahoo/Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
Because their business is based entirely on how that data correlates.
99.999999999% of the rest of the world do other things as their primary business model. Small businesses aren't going to do this because it requires a staff that KNOWS how to work with this software and get the data out.
Walmart might care, but they aren't a small business.
The local auto mechanic, or plumber, or even small companies like lawn services or maid services simply aren't big enough to justify having a staff of nerds to make the data useful to them, and they really don't have enough data to matter. It simply is too expensive on the small scale.
Companies that can REALLY benefit from the ability to comb vast quantities of data have been doing it for well over a hundred years. Insurance companies are a prime example. You know what? They aren't small in general, so they have the staff to do the data correlation and find out useful information because it works on that scale.
Anyone who cares about churning through massive amounts of data already has ways to do it. Computing will make it faster, but its not going to change the business model.
I'm kind puzzled why virtualization has anything to do with this, unless someone is implying that a smart thing to do is setup a VM server, and then run a bunch of VMs on it to get a 'cluster' to run distributed apps on ... if thats the point being made then I think someone needs to turn in their life card (they clearly never had a geek card).
So now that I've written all that, I went and read the article.
Now I realize that article is written by someone who has absolutely no idea what they are talking about and simply read a wikipedia page or two and threw in a bunch of names and buzzwords.
Hadoop doesn't help the IT department do anything with the data at all.
Its the teams of analyists and developers that write the code to make Hadoop (which is only mentioned because of its OSS nature here) and a bunch of other technologies and code all work together and produce useful output.
This article is basically written like the invention of the hammer made it so everyone would want to build their own homes because they could. Thats a stupid assumption and statement.
Slashdot should be fucking ashamed that this is posted anywhere, let alone front page.