Lesson 5: The Big Data Cloud. Big Data is a term that we've been hearing for quite a while. Big Data is often used as a marketing term. Big Data is a term for a family of strategies to analyze, extract information, look for trends from large complex data sets. These data sets are considered to be too large to gain any kind of real trends or to get usable information. So therefore, powerful analytics must be done in order to understand or get any useful information from these large datasets. So this is the kind of data analytics which require a large amounts of storage and large amounts of processing, typically high-performance processing. The Cloud can deliver a solution. So just like we saw in the high-performance computing, the Cloud again is an ideal solution to store and analyze these Big Data datasets. Cloud clusters can typically be implemented dynamically to efficiently process the Big Data datasets. Cloud solutions can also scale up or scale down as needed to accommodate the needs of the data to be analyzed. So again, these are extremely large datasets that need high power, high performance, high use of hardware in order to get any useful information from the data. The concept of a data warehouse was created primarily to shield users from the poor performance caused by analyzing data. Typically, the processing of data is scheduled to run off hours when users are not connected to the system. So again to process data, to really understand the data, requires a lot of computing resources, and if that processing would run during the time that users also need to be connected to the system, it can cause the system to slow down quite a bit. In the case of a Data Warehouse, the processing again takes place off hours and then that processed data is stored in a database that's called a Data Warehouse and similar to the concept from when a good is manufactured and then sent to a warehouse to wait to be shipped to the end customer. The processed data in the Data Warehouse is stored there for reporting. So if a user wants to now see the information that was discovered from the data, the reports will run against the Data Warehouse, and the reports will run much more efficiently than they would against live data. Cloud computing provides a great solution for this type of analytics. The Cloud computing can create the Data Warehouse and it can also offer the computing resources to process the Big Data datasets. Again, Cloud's flexibility provides that very efficient solution for Big Data, Big Data processing, and Big Data reporting.
