Big Data Bites Back: How to Handle Those Unwieldy Digits

When you can’t just cram it into tables

Data is easy. It comes in tables that store facts and figures about particular items – say, people. The columns define the data to be stored about each item (such as FirstName, LastName) and there is one row for each person. Most tabular database engines are relational and we use SQL for querying. So this “Big Data” thang must simply be very, very big tables with lots and lots of rows.…