way there, Mary had a little baby boy—named Jesus—in a manger. And the shepherds
flocked to see this baby boy. And Magi came and delivered gifts. Thus, born was the
religion many people are familiar with—Christianity. The Roman census approach is
intimately entwined with the birth of Christianity.

The Roman census method then says that you don't centralize processing if you have a
large amount of data to process. Instead, you send the processing to the data. You
distribute the processing. In doing so, you can service the processing over an effectively
unlimited amount of data.

Unstructured Data

Another issue related to big data is that of whether big data is structured or unstructured.
In many circles, it is said that all big data is unstructured. In other circles, it is said that
big data is structured.

So who is right? As we shall see, the answer lies entirely in how you define the term
“structured” and “unstructured.”

So what does “structured” mean? One widely used definition of structured is that
anything managed by a standard DBMS is structured. Fig. 4.2.1 shows some data
managed by a standard database management system.

Chapter 4.2: What Is Big Data?