Chapter 2 – Business Problems Suited to Big Data Analytics

In this chapter we look at the characteristics of business problems that traditionally have required resources that exceeded the enterprises’ scopes, yet are suited to solutions that can take advantage of the big data platforms (either dedicated hardware or virtualized/cloud-based). The focus looks at typical use cases, including business intelligence, querying and reporting, improving performance for data management, use of the high-performance platform for non-database applications, and data mining and predictive analytics applications. We then characterize applications that are suited to big data solutions: data throttling, computational performance throttling, massive data volumes, data variety, and the opportunity to benefit from data parallelism. We then take an example application and consider its suitability for big data processing.