Big data is an opportunity for parallel processing, Reinders added.

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The first successful big data technology was enterprise data warehouses that implement massively parallel processing, scale to the petabytes, handle batch and real-time latencies with equal agility, and provide connectors to structured and unstructured sources.

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Even Microsoft is getting into the game with its Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) that enables SQL Server customers evolve their SQL databases to Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture to take advantage of commodity hardware.

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Mr Joy says that his new design, which turns a single chip into a parallel-processing system, can handle huge amounts of video and audio data at speeds that would overwhelm the usual Intel chip.

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