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The company can now reduce the resolution of its investigating this anomaly, the company was able to
wind data grids by nearly 90 percent, down to a 3 x 3 quickly adjust staffing levels at its Philadelphia office
kilometer area (about 1.8 x 1.8 miles). This capability during those peak times, ensuring a manager was
enables Vestas to forecast optimal turbine placement present to resolve any issues. This enhanced Hertz’s
in 15 minutes instead of three weeks, saving a month performance and increased customer satisfaction.
of development time for a turbine site and enabling There are limits to using big data. Swimming in
Vestas customers to achieve a return on investment numbers doesn’t necessarily mean that the right
much more quickly. information is being collected or that people will
Companies are also using big data solutions to make smarter decisions. Last year, a McKinsey
analyze consumer sentiment. For example, car-rental Global Institute report cautioned there is a shortage
giant Hertz gathers data from Web surveys, e-mails, of specialists who can make sense of all the
text messages, Web site traffic patterns, and data information being generated. Nevertheless, the trend
generated at all of Hertz’s 8,300 locations in 146 towards big data shows no sign of slowing down; in
countries. The company now stores all of that data fact, it’s much more likely that big data is only going
centrally instead of within each branch, reducing to get bigger.
time spent processing data and improving company Sources: Samuel Greengard,” Big Data Unlocks Business Value,”
response time to customer feedback and changes Baseline, January 2012; Paul S. Barth, “Managing Big Data: What
in sentiment. For example, by analyzing data Every CIO Needs to Know,” CIO Insight, January 12, 2012; IBM
Corporation, “Vestas: Turning Climate into Capital with Big Data,”
generated from multiple sources, Hertz was able to
2011; IBM Corporation, “Extending and enhancing law enforce-
determine that delays were occurring for returns in ment capabilities,” “How Big Data Is Giving Hertz a Big Advantage,”
Philadelphia during specific times of the day. After and “British Library and J Start Team Up to Archive the Web,” 2010.

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Describe the kinds of big data collected by the 4. Identify three decisions that were improved by
organizations described in this case. using big data.
2. List and describe the business intelligence 5. What kinds of organizations are most likely to
technologies described in this case. need big data management and analytical tools?
3. Why did the companies described in this case Why?
need to maintain and analyze big data? What
business benefits did they obtain?

DATABASES AND THE WEB

Have you ever tried to use the Web to place an order or view a product catalog?
If so, you were probably using a Web site linked to an internal corporate
database. Many companies now use the Web to make some of the informa-
tion in their internal databases available to customers and business partners.
Suppose, for example, a customer with a Web browser wants to search an
online retailer’s database for pricing information. Figure 6.14 illustrates how
that customer might access the retailer’s internal database over the Web. The
user accesses the retailer’s Web site over the Internet using Web browser
software on his or her client PC. The user’s Web browser software requests
data from the organization’s database, using HTML commands to communi-
cate with the Web server.
Because many back-end databases cannot interpret commands written
in HTML, the Web server passes these requests for data to software that
translates HTML commands into SQL so the commands can be processed by
the DBMS working with the database. In a client/server environment, the

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