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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But parallel processing proved to be much easier to describe than to execute on a commercial scale.

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To see the road not taken, one need only think of that parallel fantasy masterpiece, written in exactly the same decades, and on a similar scale, by a similarly eccentric Englishman: T.

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