Taming The Big Data Tidal Wave: Finding Opportunities in Huge Data Streams with Advanced Analytics

Foreword

Like it or not, a massive amount of data will be coming your way soon. Perhaps it has reached you already. Perhaps you’ve been wrestling with it for a while—trying to figure out how to store it for later access, address its mistakes and imperfections, or classify it into structured categories. Now you are ready to actually extract some value out of this huge dataset by analyzing it and learning something about your customers, your business, or some aspect of the environment for your organization. Or maybe you’re not quite there, but you see light at the end of the data management tunnel.

In either case, you’ve come to the right place. As Bill Franks suggests, there may soon be not only a flood of data, but also a flood of books about big data. I’ll predict (with no analytics) that this book will be different from the rest. First, it’s an early entry in the category. But most importantly, it has a different content focus.

Most of these big-data books will be about the management of big data: how to wrestle it into a database or data warehouse, or how to structure and categorize unstructured data. If you find yourself reading a lot about Hadoop or MapReduce or various approaches to data warehousing, you’ve stumbled upon—or were perhaps seeking—a “big data management” (BDM) book.

This is, of course, important work. No matter how much data you have of whatever quality, it won’t be much good unless you get it into an environment and format in which it can be accessed and analyzed. ...