Randy Pausche once said if there is an elephant in the room you should introduce him so here goes. The latest alpha version (version 2.0.0) of the quickly evolving big-data platform “Hadoop” (the elephant) from Apache is now available. The move to alpha for version 2.0.0 is a big step up from the Read more [...]

Big data is not just for big enterprise – big data analytics can be useful for small business too. A commonly heard statement these days is “big data offers opportunities for small business” but there are few case studies or articles with any examples or actual supporting information. An interesting Read more [...]

When talking of big data there is a notion, from some, that it is just another buzz word or a hugely overhyped fad. Take a look at some of the recent technology reports such as GigaOm who recently reported “The IT hype machine has everyone jumping on the big data bandwagon”, or The Register, who Read more [...]

When thinking about platforms to handle big data probably the most terms will likely be “Hadoop” and “MapReduce” however there are other projects out there such as the Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS) from Microsoft Research. In a recent Microsoft Research article, “Data in the Fast Line”, this Read more [...]

When reading about big data there is a notion of big data tools supporting unstructured data,  that is data which has a very loose format such as a spread sheet or electronic mail where the contents could literally be anything, however dig deeper and there is little in the way of detailed information Read more [...]

Big data is expected to add £216 billion to the UK economy, largely through gains in business efficiency, whilst creating almost 60,000 new jobs, through opportunities for small business,  between now and 2017 according to a study by Cebr, the Centre for Economics and Business Research. The report Read more [...]

Apache Hadoop, the distributed computing platform , is getting a lot of attention recently and rightly so as one of the very few viable utilities to process big data by breaking up work for processing on clusters up to thousands of nodes. SAP AG, the enterprise software company, has been working on its Read more [...]

Big data and big data analytics are moving on from being the latest “buzz words” as products begin to emerge that start to address the problems of handling vast amounts of unstructured data. Yahoo! is the latest company to make an announcement with Yahoo! Genome building upon the years of experience Read more [...]