Book Image

Big Data Analytics with R

By : Simon Walkowiak
Book Image

Big Data Analytics with R

By: Simon Walkowiak

Overview of this book

Big Data analytics is the process of examining large and complex data sets that often exceed the computational capabilities. R is a leading programming language of data science, consisting of powerful functions to tackle all problems related to Big Data processing. The book will begin with a brief introduction to the Big Data world and its current industry standards. With introduction to the R language and presenting its development, structure, applications in real world, and its shortcomings. Book will progress towards revision of major R functions for data management and transformations. Readers will be introduce to Cloud based Big Data solutions (e.g. Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon RDS, Microsoft Azure and its HDInsight clusters) and also provide guidance on R connectivity with relational and non-relational databases such as MongoDB and HBase etc. It will further expand to include Big Data tools such as Apache Hadoop ecosystem, HDFS and MapReduce frameworks. Also other R compatible tools such as Apache Spark, its machine learning library Spark MLlib, as well as H2O.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Big Data Analytics with R
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introduction to NoSQL databases


We already know basic features and characteristics of the traditional Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs), which we presented in Chapter 5, R with Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs). We are also well aware of their limitations and specific requirements, for example, that they contain predefined schema, are vertically scalable which results in constant hardware upgrades to catch up with data growth, and they generally do not support unstructured or hierarchical data.

Non-relational or NoSQL databases attempt to fill these gaps and some of them are specialized in certain aspects more than others. In the next section, we will briefly present several NoSQL databases and their particular use cases.

Review of leading non-relational databases

To say that NoSQL databases are what SQL databases are not, may be a bit of an over-simplification. However, this statement is true to some extent and the following characteristics can shed some light on...