From Big Data to Modest Data by Chuck Hollis.
Mea culpa.
Several years ago, I became thoroughly enamored with the whole notion of Big Data.
I, like many, saw a brave new world of petabyte-class data sets, gleaned through by trained data science professionals using advanced algorithms — all in the hopes of bringing amazing new insights to virtually every human endeavor.
It was pretty heady stuff — and still is.
While that vision has certainly is coming to pass in many ways, there’s an interesting distinct and separate offshoot: use of big data philosophies and toolsets — but being applied to much smaller use cases with far less ambitious goals.
Call it Modest Data for lack of a better term.
No rockstars, no glitz, no glam, no amazing keynote speeches — just ordinary people getting closer to their data more efficiently and effectively than before.
That’s the fun part about technology: you put the tools in people’s hands, and they come up with all sorts of interesting ways to use it — maybe quite differently than originally intended.
Master of the metaphor, Chuck manages to talk about “big data,” “teenage sex,” “rock stars,” “Hadoop,” “business data,” and “modest data,” all in one entertaining and useful post.
While the Hadoop eco-system can handle “big data,” it also brings new capabilities to processing less than “big data,” or what Chuck calls “modest data.”
Very much worth your while to read Chuck’s post and see if your “modest” data can profit from “big data” tools.