It takes an employee, deciding that the loss of high-value customers is important, to run a query of all their data and find him, and then turn that into a business advantage.

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The dashboards provide a simple graphical user interface that allows users to query millions of rows of data.

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The simplest approach may be through the technology offered by Splunk, which has its own search language that allows you to search through big data, identify useful query types, and express your developing understanding of the structure of the data as you search.

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Analysts call this a virtual database because it can query and analyze without moving any of the data out of position.

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Responding to a congressional query, nine data companies provided answers to a detailed set of questions about what kinds of information they collect about individual Americans, and where they get that data.

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By entering certain strings of text into user input boxes on Web sites, cybercriminals are able to confuse their commands with data in a site's Structured Query Language (SQL) database and gain control of it, says Grossman.

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