A Practical Guide to Big Data

I wrote this white paper to provide a general overview of Big Data issues and opportunities as well as an overview of the various tools available to capture, process, store, access and analyze Big Data. In particular, I sought to correct an oversight in most of the existing literature: the role of search and search-based application technology in the Big Data domain.

"If one can make one’s way through the haze, it also becomes clear that Big Data is not new...What is new, however, is that new technologies have emerged that offer Big Data veterans far more palatable options, and which are enabling many organizations of all sizes and types to access and exploit Big Data for the very first time...As a result of this evolution, the Big Data universe is beginning to yield insights that are changing the way we work and the way we play, and challenging just about everything we thought we knew about ourselves, the organizations in which we work, the markets in which we operate - even the universe in which we live."

You can view/download PDFs of the Executive Summary and Table of Contents here, or view the complete white paper online.