The Big Data revolution: Big Bang or loud noise?

Anyone currently employed in any area of the IT business will be aware, however reluctantly, of the considerable amount of effort being put into marketing ‘Big Data’. Well brace yourselves, there's more of this to come. During August and September of 2012 Freeform Dynamics surveyed 502 IT professional readers of The Register …

[Marcus Haas]

Labelling

In the section "Data value is still ‘underexploited’", should the label for the lower graph not read 'UNstructured data'?

[Phil Mitchell]

Updated

Error corrected

[Tony Lock]

A link to the demographics of survey respondents can be found here:

www.freeformdynamics.com/fullarticle.asp?aid=1572

Tony Lock, Freeform Dynamics

[The right tools]

The majority of business information systems use RDBMS for structured data but that has no link to Big Data.

The sheer volumes of unstructured data make it impossible for RDBMS systems to cope as they were not designed for it. Other architectures are more suited for this like Hadoop.

But beyond the traditional RDBMS vs Hadoop debate, both are not ready to market without lengthy developments & incurred costs. What customer will wait & pay for that even before he's processed 1 byte of data. However there are commercial flat file based tools available like Secnology. Then don't think "magic software" will do the analytics, so use a Data Expert.