Quick Thoughts About Big Data
This is an area where marketers need to get up to speed quickly and stay ahead of the curve. Most consumer marketers have been exposed to pieces of the big data picture, primarily in web analytics, some propensity modeling, maybe some data mining. But now social data is starting to flow into production systems, and if location data becomes accessible, the data flood will become huge.
What to do? Most standard database approaches are not sufficient for big data, given their disk-based I/O limitations. The trend now appear to be in-memory computing, an area my employer happens to be pretty good at. So we’re learning from the huge computing farms of the financial services industry and seeing what the future might look like for consumer marketers.
More to come on the subject, but think of huge chunks of your customer database kept in memory, with business rules, models, and other processes absorbing a constant stream of data and driving continuous real-time responses.
