“An apt metaphor to explain big data is the act of braiding. Braiding requires person to take three or more locks of hair and alternating weaving them together. The end result is clean, pretty hairstyle that keeps a person’s hair in place and off the face. Big data is like braiding, because specially tailored software takes an unruly mess of data, including the combed and uncombed strands, and organizes them into a legible format. Perhaps this is why TopQuadrant named its popular big data software TopBraid, read more about its software upgrade in “TopQuadrant Launches TopBraid 5.0.””