3Vs of Big Data

Many businesses are managing a huge amount of data collected through its various data and business processes. Sometimes these data is easy to handle and process with relational databases or well-known tools like excel. However, when data is being generated so quickly, in various non-well defined formats and can be changed in real-time it becomes impossible to manage those data lake and derive valuable insights, critical for businesses, it is time to start thinking of Big Data (Rouse, no date).

There are the 3Vs (volume, variety and velocity) that are used to define dimensions of big data (Whishworks, 2017).

Quora, no date

1.   Variety 

Variety in Big Data mentions the structured and unstructured data which generated by humans and by machines. The structured data collected from pictures, videos, texts and tweets. However, unstructured data gathered from emails or voicemails, audio recording, hand-written text. Variety is the opportunity to rank the incoming data into different categories.

2.   Velocity 

Velocity refers to the speed at which dada is being created in real-time. For example, people uploaded 900 million photos on Facebook every day. Or 500 million tweets are posted on Twitter. Moreover, creators uploaded 0.4 million hours of video on YouTube. Big Data helps companies to hold a big amount of data, accept and process it fast.

3.   Volume 

Volume refers to the amount of data that is being collected from different sources like social media platforms, human interactions, networks, business processes. For example, Facebook has 2 billions users, YouTube has 1 billon users, Twitter 350 million users and Instagram 700 million users. Every day these users promote billion of photos, videos, posts and tweets.

Concluding that the 3 Vs of Big Data are perfect indicators of verifying whether your data is “big” enough to start considering data management with modern and most important, scalable approaches (Reca, 2018).

References:

Margaret Rouse, (no date) “3Vs (volume, variety and velocity)”. Available at https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/3Vs (Accessed: 31 January 2020).

Whishworks, (2017) “Understanding the 3Vs of Big Data - Volume, Velocity and Variety". Available at https://www.whishworks.com/blog/big-data/understanding-the-3-vs-of-big-data-volume-velocity-and-variety (Accessed: 30 January 2020).

Michael Reca, (2018) "The 3+ Vs of Big Data: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and a whole lot more". Available at https://www.flydata.com/blog/3-vs-of-big-data/ (Accessed: 29 January 2020).