What Data Actually Is?

In this current era, data is something you can't ignore about. Everyone is talking about data, data is everywhere, but what exactly is data? You might think that data is something technical like excel spreadsheet, or even databases. But not exactly, data is actually quite simple. What is it? Data is anything we can observe. We will talk about what is data.

Content

• Data in our daily lives
• Storing data
• Data in current world
• Technology in data
• Summary
• What next?

Data in our daily lives

Do you know, everything we do generates data? Let's take an example, let say you see someone feed a cat in the park at 11AM 🐱. What can you get?

You can get something like:

• You see someone
• Someone is feeding a cat
• There is cat in the park
• You were at the park at 11AM

Can you see it? From that simple case you can get a lot of data, now imagine what data you can get from you were born until now? It will be unimaginably massive.

Let's take another example, if you ride a car you, what data can you get? average speed? the distance between starting place and the destination? your current fuel condition? Yes! Its all data.

Storing Data

To make use of our data, if necessary we can store the data somewhere so the we can retrieve the data again if we need. Where should i store the data? Everywhere! You can keep it in your mind🧠 Write it on notebook📓 or more sophisticated, save it in Excel or a Database. I'm pretty sure some of you save your personal information like bank account on whatsapp, actually that is also storing your data, but not in a good way :D

Data in Current World

Now maybe you wonder what kind of data we have today? Whether you work on a company, study in college, or anything, you will find that each of them will have their own data. For example a school must have data about their student, their grade, the classes. Or a company must have their own product databases, their employee information, etc.

If data on our daily lives can be massive, data in company can be more massive since they are working on something worldwide. For example an industry company can have massive data, it can be log data from IoT devices, their website traffic, cars information, or from their web application which already store the data on a database. Company need to have all of this data to be able to utilise the data for their benefit. Storing all of this data might require more advance technology especially if they're handling big data (Petabyte Scale). Some of company maybe only need excel to store their data and its sufficient, but some other company maybe need more advanced tools like database, or even data warehouses.