288 Big Data Computing
and transforming all data are signicant; it may take several hours to load a
decent data size even with parallel loading.
As a result, in order to use the sophisticated features of a database system,
users have to wait until their data are loaded (and then tuned). However,
with Big Data arriving at high rates, it is not feasible anymore to reserve sev-
eral hours for data loading as it creates a big gap between data creation and
data exploitation.
External Files
One feature that almost all open source and commercial database products
provide is external tables. External les are typically in the form of raw text-
based les in CSV format (comma-separated values). With the external tables
functionality, one can simply atta ...