Total Enterprise Data Growth 2005-2015
The massive growth of unstructured or semi-structured data is amazing and has implications for data warehouse / business intelligence / data analytics architecture and database design. The way we capture, store, analyze, and distribute data is transforming. New technologies like deduplication, compression, and analysis tools are lowering costs.
Structured data gives names to each field in a database and defines the relationships between the fields. Unstructured data is usually not stored in a relational database (as traditionally defined) where the data model is relevant to the meaning of the data.
The Internet of Things (equipping all objects in the world with identifying devices), blogs, videos, social media, emails, notes from call centers, and all forms of human and computer to computer communications will soon start to produce massive amounts of unstructured or semi-structured data.
The trick is to create value by extracting the right information from both internal and external data sources. That is what the science of data and art of business analytics needs to learn to extract from larger and larger sets of unstructured data.