With the advent of smartphones with Internet connections and the widespread use of social media, a data explosion has been witnessed in recent years. Almost 90 percent of the data that exists today has been generated only in the last two years. Analyzing this wealth and volume of data offers remarkable opportunities.

Big data has different characteristics than traditional data. In the first chapter, the book lists the three Vs that make big data a different technology: velocity, variety, and volume. The computer industry has developed platforms for processing big data. Hadoop was the prominent one for a long time. However, due to its bottlenecks in handling every type of data, technology giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft soon created their own platforms. This book surveys the most popular platforms for processing big data, and informs the reader about which platforms will be good with what kind of data and problems.

The book starts with an introductory chapter, where the concept of big data is defined and the characteristics of big data are listed. Chapter 2 presents information about the Hadoop, Spark, Flink, and ASTERIX platforms. Chapter 3 lists the SQL-based languages for processing large-scale data, such as Hive and Spark SQL. Chapter 4 examines large-scale graph processing systems. Hadoop and other systems work well with unstructured, tabular data. However, they do not work very well with iterative graph algorithms. Chapter 5 provides an overview of large-scale stream processing systems such as Pig Latin and Storm. Data generated from various hardware, such as sensors, are in the format of flowing streams of data. Chapter 6 concludes the book and presents the weaknesses of the current systems.

With the boom of big data, many big data systems have been built. This book lists them and divides them into categories. It is a good resource for students, academics, researchers, and professionals, as it can help them to gain a good understanding of the characteristics of big data, as well as an overview of the existing big data processing systems. Having said that, it is important to mention that this is a survey book, and therefore it lacks technical details. However, readers can pursue further research on the specific systems they are interested in after getting a brief introduction with this book.