Big Data For Dummies

Chapter 12

Defining Big Data Analytics

In This Chapter

Using big data to get results

Finding what’s different with big data

Exploring the challenges of analyzing big data

Examining analytics tools for big data

Up until this point, we’ve been spending a lot of time describing the infrastructure you need to support your big data initiatives. However, because big data is most useful if you can do something with it, the question becomes, how do you analyze it?

Companies like Amazon and Google are masters at analyzing big data. And they use the resulting knowledge to gain a competitive advantage. Just think about Amazon’s recommendation engine. The company takes all your buying history together with what it knows about you, your buying patterns, and the buying patterns of people like you to come up with some pretty good suggestions. It is a marketing machine, and its big data analytics capabilities have made it extremely successful.

The capability to analyze big data provides unique opportunities for your organization as well. You’ll be able to expand the kind of analysis you can do. ...