In this chapter, we went through what Big Data is and why it is one of the compelling needs of the industry. The diversity of data that needs to be processed has taken Information Technology to heights that were never imagined before. Organizations that are able to take advantage of Big Data to parse any and every data will be able to more effectively differentiate and derive new value for the business, whether it is in the form of revenue growth, cost savings, or creating entirely new business models. For example, financial firms using machine learning to build better fraud detection algorithms, go beyond the simple business rules involving charge frequency and location to also include an individual's customized buying patterns ultimately leading to a better customer experience.
When it comes to Big Data implementations, these new requirements challenge traditional data management technologies and call for a new approach to enable organizations to effectively manage, enrich, and gain insights from any data. Apache Hadoop is one of the undoubted leaders in the Big Data industry. The entire ecosystem, along with its supporting projects provides the users a highly reliable, fault tolerant framework that can be used for massively parallel distributed processing of unstructured and semi-structured data.
In the next chapter, you will see how to use the Sqoop connector to move Hadoop data to SQL Server 2012 and vice versa. Sqoop is another open source project, which is designed for bi-directional import/export of data from Hadoop from/to any Relational Database Management System; we will see its usage as a first step of data integration between Hadoop and SQL Server 2012.
