Even though NoSQL databases like Amazon’s own DynamoDB are very popular today, for many business use cases, there’s almost no way around using a traditional relational database. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), released back in October 2009, is one of Amazon’s first cloud services and can therefore be seen as a very mature service.
The term ‘big data’ is used so commonly in research and marketing terms, you would think it’s been here forever. But actually, big data evolved from database marketing (read first efforts of targeted direct mail) in the mid to late 1980’s. This was the first attempt of marketing agencies and large corporations to begin segmenting their customer databases to create different offers based on the demographics or psychographics of their customers.