A Bird's Eye View on Big Data

This chapter presents the qualities of Big Data, components of Big Data platform, and use cases of Big Data. Big Data objects are produced from large‐scale simulations of computational dynamics and weather modeling. Hadoop distributed file system aims to deliver the following promises: failure recovery, stream data access, and support very large data sets. Hadoop became the open‐source solution for the Big Data explosion. The chapter aims to define Big Data as a new breed of data, resulting from technological advancements in storage and growing understanding of value extraction, different than traditional structured data in terms of volume, velocity, variety, and complexity. Big Data platforms may consist of many parts such as batch processing, real‐time analytics, reporting, business intelligence, machine learning and so on. The chapter combines these parts into four main components: ingestion, storage, computation, and presentation. Institutions make use of Big Data in the form querying, reporting, alerting, searching, exploring, mining, and modeling.