Big Data

Preface

When I first entered the world of Big Data, it felt like the Wild West of software development. Many were abandoning the relational database and its familiar comforts for NoSQL databases with highly restricted data models designed to scale to thousands of machines. The number of NoSQL databases, many of them with only minor differences between them, became overwhelming. A new project called Hadoop began to make waves, promising the ability to do deep analyses on huge amounts of data. Making sense of how to use these new tools was bewildering.

At the time, I was trying to handle the scaling problems we were faced with at the company at which I worked. The architecture was intimidatingly complex—a web of sharded relational databases, ...