Data Structures

Big data can come in multiple forms, including structured and non-structured data such as financial data, text files, multimedia files, and genetic mappings. Contrary to much of the traditional data analysis performed by organizations, most of the Big Data is unstructured or semi-structured in nature, which requires different techniques and tools to process and analyze.

Distributed computing environments and massively parallel processing (MPP) architectures that enable parallelized data ingest and analysis are the preferred approach to process such complex data.

With this in mind, this section takes a closer look at data structures.

Figure 1-3 shows four types of data structures, with 80–90% of future data growth coming from non- structured data types.

Though different, the four are commonly mixed. For example, a classic Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) may store call logs for a software support call center. The RDBMS may store characteristics of the support calls as typical structured data, with attributes such as time stamps, machine type, problem type, and operating system. In addition, the system will likely have unstructured, quasi- or semi-structured data, such as free-form call log information taken from an e-mail ticket of the problem, customer chat history, or transcript of a phone call describing the technical problem and the solu- tion or audio file of the phone call conversation. Many insights could be extracted from the unstructured, quasi- or semi-structured data in the call center data.

Although analyzing structured data tends to be the most familiar technique, a different technique is required to meet the challenges to analyze semi-structured data (shown as XML), quasi-structured (shown as a clickstream), and unstructured data.

Here are examples of how each of the four main types of data structures may look.

^● Structure ddata:Datacontainingadefineddatatype,format,andstructure(thatis,transactiondata, online analytical processing [OLAP] data cubes, traditional RDBMS, CSV files, and even simple spread- sheets). See Figure 1-4.

AGGIUNGERE ESEMPI DI STRUCTURED...