Unstructured Data

The phrase unstructured data usually refers to information that doesn't reside in a traditional row-column database. Information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner (e.g., pictures or video).

The phrase unstructured data usually refers to information that doesn't reside in a traditional row-column database. As you might expect, it's the opposite of structured data - the data stored in fields in a database. Unstructured data files often include text and multimedia content. Examples include e-mail messages, word processing documents, videos, photos, audio files, presentations, webpages and many other kinds of business documents. Note that while these sorts of files may have an internal structure, they are still considered "unstructured" because the data they contain doesn't fit neatly in a database. Experts estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the data in any organization is unstructured. And the amount of unstructured data in enterprises is growing significantly - often many times faster than structured databases are growing.