CHENNAI: Systems and applications for cloud-based storage and processing of big data in e-governance are challenges indeed, especially given the amount of raw data that’s generated in databases across the country each day, said V B Ganapathy, scientist, National Informatics Centre, at a guest lecture held at Hindustan University recently. He was interacting with students of the Department of Computer Applications of the university. “At present, the challenges faced in e-governance include storage issues because of large volume of data, slow speed and unstructured nature of data,” he said. “The traditional database management systems cannot be used in handling big chunks of data in e-governance,” he added.
Ganapathy also said that big data is a large volume of unstructured ones which cannot be handled by traditional Relational Database Management System and Object Relational Database Management System.
Students were provided interactive examples and exposure to big data analytics, storage using HDFS and few techniques for Computing using MapReduce. Overall, the programmme was an eye-opening experience for most undergraduate students who had little knowledge about big data, while the postgraduate students looked to explore some areas for projects especially in efficient storage and processing of data.