Big Data

Question 1

What is Big Data?

Answer 1

Can be described in terms of:
- Volume - too big to fit on a single server
- Velocity - streaming data requires milliseconds to analyse and respond
- Variety - data in many forms such as structured, unstructured, text, multimedia

Question 2

What is the most difficult aspect of Big Data?

Answer 2

The lack of structure

Question 3

Why is the lack of structure in Big Data a challenge?

Answer 3

• Analysing the data is made significantly more difficult
• Relational databases are not appropriate because they require the data to fit into a row-and-column format

Question 4

What are the ways to handle Big Data?

Answer 4

• Fact-graph model for representing data
• Use machine learning to process unstructured data and extract useful information
• Functional programming used in distributed processing of data

Question 5

Why does that fact that data doesn’t fit on a single server become a problem for Big Data?

Answer 5

Relational Databases do not scale well across multiple machines so functional programming must be used

Question 6

What is the source of Big Data?

Answer 6

Data from networked sensors, smartphones, video surveillance, mouse clicks etc are continuously streamed

Question 7

Describe the fact-graph model

Answer 7

• Raw data stored as atomic facts
• Facts capture one single piece of information
• Facts are immutable and externally true due to timestamps

Question 8

What are the components used to make up the fact-graph model?

Answer 8

• Nodes used to represent the core entities
• Edges used to represent the relationships
• Properties used to capture information about the nodes