As we have highlighted many times in this book, the Internet of Things, including a vast array of sensor devices, streaming video data, more diverse and complicated business applications and the exploding world of online social media outlets have given rise to a proliferation of not only structured, but now unstructured data that needs to be stored and analyzed efficiently and effectively. This demand has driven a new data persistence domain called Big Data.
Big Data is being defined in many different ways, and in many cases the views and definitions by the various vendors vary and are generally swayed in favor of their particular solutions. However, in general, it is agreed that Big Data is categorized using the three Vs. This refers firstly, to the Volume of data that now exists and will substantially increase of the coming years, then we have the Velocity of the data which can, in many cases stream into a company's computing infrastructure at data rates making it...