09 Jun Big Data

Beyond relational database management systems (RDBMS), online analytical processing (OLAP) and advanced business intelligence (BI), humanity has finally evolved to a technology that doesn’t need an acronym: Big Data. Instead, we choose names of children’s toys (HADOOP the toy elephant) and confusing word munges (MapReduce) to describe the best new thing in high-performance data access. Big Data not only avoids the pain of endless joins between relational tables that drag most systems to their metaphorical knees, it also provides a single, elegant mechanism for accessing both structured and unstructured data. This is a key to the final answer.