Remember the days before the relational database? Neither do I, so I have no idea how painful it was to keep track of data back then. But even after relational databases became more mainstream, data was still mostly about keeping track of stuff: product inventory, customer information, customer orders, etc.

Then, one day, everyone wanted to use their databases to make better decisions. Before we knew it, we had data warehouses and business intelligence (BI) tools. Soon after, big data appeared, and smart people realized the relational database and data warehouse weren’t very good for that. Search engines, Apache Hadoop, NoSQL databases, Apache Kafka, et al., got more attention.

Source: datanami.com
Author: Shant Hovsepian