Well BIG DATA is all what we are surrounded by in today’s world. The web and the mobile world is generating enormous amount of data. Facebook for instance according to some old figures generates approximately 500 TERA BYTE of data each day, YES each day 500 TB !!! 

The digital world has started to generate this huge amount of data in past few years only. We on earth are generating and capturing more and more data each day than ever before. The data that is produced is of all types, it includes pictures, videos, logs, tweets, Facebook posts, emails, google queries and so on and so forth. It would be true to say that we are producing more data each year than all the data produced in previous years combined. 

In the conventional digital world we are used to handle data which is structured and is in tables but the kind of data that we are talking about is unstructured or very loosely structured. The complexity of the data sourcing out of different channels like web world, mobile and other areas makes it even more difficult to analyse and unlike most conventional data its distributed at different geographical locations.

The following book will give your more idea about Big Data.

The data which now we are referring as BIG DATA is actually in plane simple terms FAST DATA as well. If you look at the examples of BIG DATA above like Facebook posts, emails, google queries are getting generated at a very fast speed.

Now we know what is BIG DATA and we have discussed the various challenges associated with it like the volume, variety and velocity. Image if such huge amount of data, which is complex, unstructured and getting generated at such a speed has to be captured and analysed using the conventional relational database management systems it would have been not possible to do so.  

What is the solution then, HADOOP is one such framework that has the answers to the challenges posed by BIG DATA.