The industry moves to understand that cloud-native data analytics is not the forklift for the on-prem data stores, but leveraging PAYG billing and serverless computing in addition to scalable cloud storage moves the data analytics to the whole new level.”Big Data use cases of 2018These thoughts and opinions were proven to be true, and below I list several business use cases, highlighting the growing adoption of data-driven business analytics.Using GPUs to process Big Data with superior speedStandard GPUs are multi-threaded chips with at least 5,000 computing cores intended to do the image rendering, vector processing and high-speed computations required for gaming..Ami Gal, CEO and co-founder of SQream proposed to use GPUs instead of CPUs for high-speed data processing..If the GPU works as intended, but the vectors it processes are actually in a DB with an SQL query on top, this superior speed can be put to good use in data analytics.The main challenge was to find a DB able to work atop a GPU, and they had to build their own solution for that..Their solution proved to be an efficient approach when a telecom operator with more than 40 million active subscribers wanted to speed up their Business Analytics..The existing MPP Data Warehouse took 1–3 minutes to complete a simple query against a 14 TB database of customer profiles, call records and other data..SQream DB did the job in merely 8 seconds while being able to scale to 40 TBs with ease.Big Data promises big revenues for oil and gas industryGeological exploration nowadays had evolved far from simply boring the test apertures in an attempt to locate oil or gas fields..Huge volumes of 2D, 3D, and 4D seismic images are processed to identify the picture of the oil/gas deposits below and maximize the chance of finding productive seismic trace signatures — the sweet spots for boring, which were not identifiable earlier..Thus said, IoT infrastructure, edge computing, ML models and Big Data analytics solutions when combined can minimize the oil & gas industry expenses and maximize its revenues..It even allows using the public weather and geological data to predict oil & gas fields without even performing the costly exploration.The other important area of Big Data application in the oil and gas industry is maximizing the cost-efficiency ratio of all operations..IoT sensors on the bores and pipes, on the pumping stations and scattered across the oil drilling fields help analyze the efficiency of the equipment used and maximize the ROI..It’s better to replace the bore head for a more sturdy one immediately upon meeting the dense granite layer than pay for the whole equipment repairs and overhaul if the issue is discovered too late.Security of oil processing is the third area of application, as smart cameras and sensors can analyze the normal oil processing patterns and alert the operators/stop the operations immediately should something go awry..This is a huge leap forward from the post-incident analysis and external alerting systems widely adopted in the earlier days.Big Data in pharmaceutics: a wide range of applicationsPharmaceutical industry sits on the troves of data and is actively trying to put them to good use through the power of predictive analytics based on Big Data.. More details