The 3 Vs of Big Data

On the last post, we talked about what is Big Data with an overview of it where we had a preview about the 3 Vs of Big Data as well. Now we are going to talk about it with more details, exploring examples that make easy to understand. 

Big data is data that contains a greater variety arriving in increasing volumes and with ever-higher velocity. This is known as the three Vs (Oracle, 2020). 

Volume 

This refers to the amount of information generated by websites, platforms, social media, apps, systems and so on, for billions of users every moment, every day. It means that every single interaction by the user generates a piece of information if we just look at social media, for instance, Facebook has around 2 billions of users (Whishworks, 2017) and every like, every post and comment made by them creates data which can be lately analysed or even in real time. It is already a huge amount of information, now imagine all the Data is generated for all of these online networks together. 

The amounts of data rang by kilobytes (text document) to a few gigabytes (movie file) and can also be generated for machines as for example weather sensors, GPSs, smartphones and so on. 

Velocity 

Velocity is the fast rate at which data is received and (perhaps) acted on (Oracle, 2020) The speed of data can be analysed by using a batch process, bits or stream. With the spread of mobile phones and internet Data has been processed in real-time with a stream for example. Every day 900 million pictures are uploaded on Facebook (Whishworks, 2017). Looking to all the available online platforms this massive amount of data being streamed on real-time keeps demanding new technologies that follow this exponential growth. 

Variety 

That regards to the different types of data created, can it be structured as texts messages, twitters, photos and videos and so on, and semistructured as voice messages, audio recordings, handwriting and emails. It either can be produced by humans or machines. Variety is about the ability to classify the incoming data into various categories (Whishworks, 2017). 

References

SAS, 2020. Big Data: What it is and why it matters. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.sas.com/en_ie/insights/big-data/what-is-big-data.html [Accessed on 5 February 2020].

Oracle, 2020. What Is Big Data? [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.oracle.com/ie/big-data/guide/what-is-big-data.html [Accessed on 06 February 2020].

Whishworks, 2017. Understanding the 3 Vs of Big Data - Volume, Velocity and Variety. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.whishworks.com/blog/big-data/understanding-the-3-vs-of-big-data-volume-velocity-and-variety [Accessed on 06 February 2020]

Another reference  

Soubra, D. 2012. The 3Vs that define Big Data. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/forum/topics/the-3vs-that-define-big-data [Accessed on 05 February 2020].