Big Data Engineering: What Is It and Why You Should Care

In today's digital age, Big data is everywhere. From social media to      e-commerce, from healthcare to finance, from manufacturing to entertainment, every industry generates massive amounts of data that is needed to derive insights. The term "Big Data" refers to these large and complex data sets that are difficult to process using traditional data processing tools. But how do we make sense of this Big data? How do we store it, process it, analyze it, and use it for making decisions? This is where big data engineering comes in.

Big Data Engineering is the process of collecting, processing, and managing large and complex data sets to extract valuable insights and intelligence. The data can come from various sources, such as social media, sensors, transactional data, and more. The goal is to organize, transform, and analyze the data to make it useful for business decision-making. Big Data Engineering involves various processes, including data ingestion, storage, processing, analysis and visualization.

Big Data Ingestion

Big Data ingestion is a process of connecting to disparate sources, extracting the data, and moving the data into Big Data stores for storage and further analysis. It involves prioritizing data sources, validating individual files, and routing data items to the correct destination.

Big Data Storage

Big Data storage is concerned with storing and managing data in a scalable way, satisfying the needs of applications that require access to the data. The ideal Big Data storage system would allow the storage of an unlimited amount of data, cope both with high rates of random write, and read access.

The storage system flexibly and efficiently deals with a range of different data models, supporting both structured and unstructured data. There are challenges like Volume, Velocity, Variety in storing Big data.

Big Data Processing

Big Data processing encompasses a set of techniques used before the application of a data mining method as large amounts of data are likely to be imperfect, containing inconsistencies and redundancies and not directly applicable for starting a data mining process. Big Data processing includes a wide range of disciplines, data preparation, data reduction techniques, data transformation, integration, cleansing, and normalization.

Big Data Analysis

Big Data Analysis involves applying analytical tools and techniques to the processed data to uncover insights and trends. This process typically involves the use of advanced statistical and machine learning techniques. This is a step where data engineering meets analytics with Big Data Engineers working closely with data scientists and analysts to ensure that the data is analyzed in a way that is relevant to the business.

Big Data Visualization

Big Data visualization refers to the implementation of more contemporary visualization techniques to illustrate the relationships within data. Visualization tactics include applications that can display real-time changes and more illustrative graphics, thus going beyond pie, bar, and other charts.

In conclusion, Big Data Engineering is a complex and exciting field that plays a critical role in enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions. It requires a strong foundation in computer science, mathematics, and a deep understanding of distributed systems, databases, and data processing frameworks. The demand for Big Data Engineers is expected to continue to grow as businesses seek to unlock the full potential of their data.

Thu Mar 9, 2023