Microsoft Busts Common Big Data Myths and Highlights New Tools

With O'Reilly Strata underway, Microsoft has had a lot to say about Big Data over the past few days. Throughout the conference, the Microsoft SQL Server Team has been posting a series of articles looking at some of the myths and misunderstandings about big data that prevent many organizations from fully embracing Big Data. This series addresses a number of myths: Is a Big Data strategy difficult and expensive to implement? Do you need a team of specialized data scientists? What departments can really benefit from Big Data.

If you're interested in Big Data, be sure to check out this myth-busting series:

Busting Big Data Adoption Myths–Part 1 | Busting Big Data Adoption Myths–Part 2 | Busting Big Data Adoption Myths with Halo 4–Part 3

A new whitepaper was also released this week looking at how the Halo 4 team (yeah, the team behind the game) uses a cloud-based solution for Big Data to analyze BI data and act upon these insights. They can respond to business requests, identify in-game trends, and provide frequent updates to the game based on user activity.

See the keynote by Dave Campbell, Microsoft Technical Fellow on this subject. We hope you find it interesting.

Microsoft also discussed some of its new Big Data-related offerings, including Data Explorer (which brings Big Data connectivity to Excel 2013) and HDInsight (Microsoft’s Apache compatible Hadoop distribution).