In the past, the Big Data challenge put the spotlight on operational systems and data warehouses. Data mining and reporting emerged with the promise of improving decision-making and results.

The big data and analytics paradigm is based on the notion that organisations must more fully exploit their information assets, and move to a culture of fact-based and data-driven decision-making in ...

"It's like the difference between crude and refined oil," says Dr. Rado Kotorov, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Builders. "Combining data provides new context and new use cases for the data.

This article is more than 9 years old. One of the key observations about the difference between big data sources and those traditionally used by enterprise applications is the strength of the signal.