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Encyclopedia of Security and Emergency Management pp 1–3Cite as

Big Data

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Definition

Big Data is a term used to refer to data that exceeds the capacity of traditional databases and does not easily fit into the structure of traditional databases.

Introduction

Big Data is a term used to refer to data that exceeds the capacity of traditional databases and does not easily fit into the structure of traditional databases. The need to accommodate data of this scale and nontraditional structure appeared with the advent of event streams (such as network event logs of systems with millions of users), large deployments of sensor data, archiving and indexing of the entire World Wide Web (WWW), and visual streams of high-resolution satellite data covering large areas. Such sources can easily generate terabytes (1 TB = 1000 GB) of data if not petabytes (1 PB = 1000 TB).

Using a traditional SQL-based Postgres database for comparison, Postgres version 9, had a limit of 32 TB per table. In 2008, Yahoo claimed to have the largest Postgres database in the world with a size of...

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References

  • Ahuja, M., et al. (2009). Peta_scale Data Warehousing at Yahoo! In SIGMOD ’09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data, June 2009, pp. 855–862.

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  • Lai, E. (2008, May 22). Size matters: Yahoo claims 2-petabyte database is world’s biggest, busiest. Computerworld.

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Further Reading

  • Buyya, R., Calheiros, R. N., & Dastjerdi, A. V. (2016). Big data: Principles and paradigms. Cambridge, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Constantine (Dean) K. Christakos

Authors
  1. Constantine (Dean) K. Christakos
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Security, Fire & Emergency Mgmt, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, USA

    Lauren R. Shapiro

  2. Dept. of Security, Fire & Emergency Mgmt, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA

    Marie-Helen Maras

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Christakos, C.(.K. (2020). Big Data. In: Shapiro, L.R., Maras, MH. (eds) Encyclopedia of Security and Emergency Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69891-5_5-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69891-5_5-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69891-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69891-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Law and CriminologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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