The New Model of Data: Big Data And The Cloud

Grazed from TomsITPro.  Author: Scott M. Fulton.

"Database management involves the sharing of large quantities of data by many users — who, for the most part, conceive their actions on the data independently from one another," wrote Dr. E. F. Codd, the creator of the relational model for data. "The opportunities for users to damage data shared in this way are enormous, unless all users, whether knowledgeable about programming or not, abide by a discipline."

In Dr. Codd’s world, data was a fluid substance that needed to be kindled and cultivated in the storehouses of his time, the "data banks." His argument was that the only way to ensure the accuracy of data in its ability to reflect some sort of truth, and its efficiency in being able to point the way toward a possible course of action by a business, was through the universal enactment of a set of standards and practices, and the implementation of a common language — his discipline, which led to SQL. In a modern context, one could say Codd advised a networking of the people who administer data, coupled with a centralization of data around an economy of principles…

The first commercial Internet ran contrary to Codd’s advice. It established a torrential sea of asynchronously communicating network hosts, all capable of servicing each other’s requests for data anonymously. The first efforts to establish some kind of centralized core, retaining a universal directory of data published on the Web by all its participants — the first Web portals — eventually failed. What did succeed was the search engine: a device that scans the contents of published documents after the fact, and generates an index of their content based on semantic relationships — educated guesses. To this day, search engineers refine the means by which those guesses are educated. The Web has been an expanding mass of text, having yielded fewer tools for businesses, governments, and schools to organize and make sense of it all, than originally promised…

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