Comments on: Unifying data

By: bitblue

bitblue — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 19:37:00 +0000

I agree that the difference between structured and unstructured data is somewhat blurry. For one, consider a CLOB sitting in a database. Is this structured? Are VARCHARs spanning 2000 bytes structured? Maybe, maybe not. The fact that they represent a column within a table is not enough to make that distinction. Similarly a text document or a JPEG file. I’d argue, if they hadn’t structure, they would both be close to garbage.

By: Andy Hayler

Andy Hayler — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 02:33:00 +0000

Thanks for your comment. I can also think of very few examples indeed.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 10:55:00 +0000

I can remember an application we made in the mid 90ths. A perfume manufacturer wanted to keep track of it’s competitor sales by buying GFK and Nielsen data. We added the images of the bottles which were used (the shape and looks of the bottle is very important) and even attached the TV commercials used in the differetn countries. In this way marketeers could look up the salesfigures of the competition and the most important sales “influencers”. Otherwise I have indeed heard only a lot of talkign about combining structured and unstructured but surprisingly(?)very few examples