Big Data is all the buzz today. There is no dearth of articles about Big Data, Data in the Cloud, Data Mining, Analytics, etc. But what exactly do these terms mean? This series of articles will explain Big Data and how it applies to Broadband Service Providers. It will explain what they can do with it, why they should do it, and show how Big Data techniques may be implemented by Broadband Service Providers to benefit their business. Definition The term Big Data refers in traditional IT to “a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.”[Wikipedia] A more useful definition of Big Data for our purposes would be thus: a sufficiently large collection of data that can be analyzed to provide information that may not be obvious without such analysis. To be useful, data should have these three traits – it should be timely, relevant and accurate. Analyzing this data to detect recurring patterns (referred to as “Data Mining”) often requires specialized tools to store and work on the data. Data mining is sufficiently advanced that a lot of open source and vendor provided tools [...]
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