Bernard Marr defines Big Data as the digital trace that we are generating in this digital era. In this course, you will learn about the characteristics of Big Data and its application in Big Data Analytics. You will gain an understanding about the features, benefits, limitations, and applications of some of the Big Data processing tools. You’ll explore how Hadoop and Hive help leverage the benefits of Big Data while overcoming some of the challenges it poses. Hadoop is an open-source framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. Hive, a data warehouse software, provides an SQL-like interface to efficiently query and manipulate large data sets residing in various databases and file systems that integrate with Hadoop. Apache Spark is an open-source processing engine that provides users new ways to store and make use of big data. It is an open-source processing engine built around speed, ease of use, and analytics. In this course, you will discover how to leverage Spark to deliver reliable insights. The course provides an overview of the platform, going into the different components that make up Apache Spark. In this course, you will also learn about Resilient Distributed Datasets, or RDDs, that enable parallel processing across the nodes of a Spark cluster.