What do people buy most of before a hurricane? Wal-Mart determined that batteries are the number ones sales item before a hurricane, but the second most sold item was surprising: pop-tarts. That's the type of intelligence that can come from analysts asking the right questions about their customers and then IT delivering systems that can help them get an answer.

More and more companies are starting to deal with big data. Big data is usually seen as extremely large sets of data. Those data sets often exceed the capability of what a single database server can handle, and place a strain on existing IT infrastructures, especially when there is an explosion of new datab types. Hadoop is an open source framework that's designed to deal with large sets of data and help with the processing and analysis of these large data sets.

Read the rest of "Pop Tarts and Hurricanes" at SQLServerCentral.