Strategic Analytics and SAS

Understanding Data in a Visual Environment

Big data: When you hear or read that buzzword, what do you think of? One person’s big data might actually be relatively small or medium data to someone else. The phrase is obviously relative in nature. Let’s say you have a data set that contains 1 billion rows: that’s a 1 followed by nine zeros: 1,000,000,000. Most organizations probably consider this big data. Think about it: If you lined up 1 billion 18-inch sticks end to end, you could reach the moon! The data set that we are going to work with in this chapter, however, has about 1.5 million rows of data with about 50 columns. It is sizeable enough for you to get the idea. But if you had a billion-row data set, this technology would scale ...