초록
The term "Big Data" has been defined to encapsulate a broad spectrum of data sources and data formats. It is often described to be unstructured data due to its properties of variety in data formats. Even though the traditional methods of structuring data in rows and columns have been reinvented into column families, key-value or completely replaced with JSON documents in document-based databases, the fact still remains that data have to be reshaped to conform to certain structure in order to persistently store the data on disc. ETL processes are key in restructuring data. However, ETL processes incur additional processing overhead and also require that data sources are maintained in predefined formats. Consequently, data in certain formats are completely ignored because designing ETL processes to cater for all possible data formats is almost impossible. Potentially, these unconsidered data sources can provide useful insights when incorporated into big data analytics. In this project, using big data solution, Apache Spark, we tapped into other sources of data stored in their raw formats such as various text files, compressed files etc and incorporated the data with persistently stored enterprise data in MongoDB for overall data analytics using MongoDB Aggregation Framework and MapReduce. This significantly differs from the traditional ETL systems in the sense that it is compactible regardless of the data formats at source.