In your Big Data journey, you are likely to get exposed to the big ongoing debate between building large Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDW) or Massive Parallel Data warehouses (MPP) and Big Data. If your organization has already invested in large data warehouse systems, you are likely to face resistance from certain quarters on the new necessity to invest in Big Data. If you already have a data warehouse, you will at least be expected to resolve what happens to that investment with your new Big Data initiatives. In this section, we will tackle some of these questions.

Bill Inmon, the widely acclaimed father of the data warehouse, describes one as "a subject-oriented, nonvolatile, integrated, time-variant collection of data created for the purpose of the management's decision making." Data warehouses require data that is inherently structured and of very good quality. The entire premise of a data warehouse is built on...