SQL Server Pro - May 2013

Growing Big Data
New ways to use data sources
and unstructured data for
decision making

big Data is definitely one of the most important grow- ing trends in the database industry. Much like busi- ness intelligence (BI), Big Data is important because it allows an organization to derive decision making information from new data sources. Unlike BI, Big Data enables the use of data sources and unstructured data for decision making that wasn’t possible before.

In my recent interview with David Campbell, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, Campbell pointed out some of the driving forces behind the emergence of Big Data, including the declining cost of storage and the availability of larger disk drives. One of the unwritten laws of storage is that you can always find a way to fill any and all unused storage, and Big Data can certainly do that. However, just as important as the availability of greater storage capacity is the fact that cost of data acquisition has declined. Campbell noted that a decade ago, most data was produced from manual entry.

Editorial

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Michael Otey

is senior technical director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Pro and author of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 High Availability with Clustering & Database Mirroring (McGraw-Hill).