In Review: Hadoop, Business Intelligence, and Data Warehousing

[Former Member]

Big data is the “it” thing right now, but unlike previous “it”s in the Internet Age, big data is assuredly here to stay. Being able to parse through this data is critical, but having the data at your hands is the prerequisite that many companies still lack. For those that do, it’s likely thanks to Hadoop, an open source platform that can store nearly unlimited amounts of data, allowing for its users to have any information it needs at the click of a button. This free software, available here, has quickly risen through the ranks of big data platforms because of its unique ability to run deep analytics and perform computationally complex tasks. Having Hadoop, however, is only a game-changer in the right hands.

Luckily, many colleges are recognizing the growing need for those skilled in business analytics and working with platforms such as Hadoop. With the projected growth rate for the highly-competitive and lucrative field of management analysts at 19% over the next decade, getting graduate degrees in relevant fields will set job applicants apart from their competitors. As the first fully online Business Intelligence and Analytics master’s degree, Saint Joseph’s University provides a crucial starting point for those wishing to enter, or increase their prestige in, the field of big data. Taught by the acclaimed faculty of the Erivan K. Haub School of Business, the curriculum here provides a comprehensive overview of the education needed to assure oneself success in the field of business analytics.

Hadoop itself is taught in two of the classes in this program, a distinct advantage because of the excellent platform it is when it comes to data warehousing. In just one of a line of impressive testimonials, the data-analytics company Neustar went from being able to track 60 days of data to 18 months’ worth of data once they began using Hadoop. Such occurrences are uncommon, and this is vital for growing businesses and anybody looking to maneuver successfully through large amounts of data. Some of its biggest advantages occur not with storing the amount data, but with expediting the time for processing and protecting the data stored. From the SAS analytics software blog, Hadoop is praised for these, and many other, reasons.

“Unlike traditional relational databases, you don’t have to preprocess data before storing it. And that includes unstructured data like text, images and videos. You can store as much data as you want and decide how to use it later,” and “Data and application processing are protected against hardware failure. If a node goes down, jobs are automatically redirected to other nodes to make sure the distributed computing does not fail. And it automatically stores multiple copies of all data.”

Your data will be protected, and your data will be available immediately. The brilliance of Hadoop is its open-source nature, so great updates will be happening at a faster pace via community collaboration. This is a platform to understandably get excited about, and with the right education, business intelligence and predictive analytics will be a field opened up to those ready to get their hands on some big data.