Structured Data Vs. Unstructured Data

Data can be Structured or Unstructured.

Difference between Structured and Unstructured Data

What is Structured Data?

Structured data has fixed formats, while unstructured data does not have a fixed format. Structured data is organized in tables, columns, and rows or records. Structured data is like the contents of a spreadsheet (Excel file), an Access database table, or a comma-separated value (CSV) file. Structured Data contains information that is meant to be analyzed by machines rather than humans. Structured data comes from many sources including direct feeds of pre-existing databases, web pages like news articles and social networks like Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, logs files (server activity), files used for business transactions processing, transactional e-mail systems such as those sending orders and invoices, online shops’ databases, etc. Structured Data is much easier to understand when you are reading it in a spreadsheet-like format.

To summarize: Structured Data

Structured data has fixed formats that are organized in tables, columns, and rows or records. Structured data is like the contents of a spreadsheet (Excel file), an Access database table, or a comma-separated value (CSV) file. Structured Data contains information that is meant to be analyzed by machines rather than humans. Structured data comes from many sources including direct feeds of pre-existing databases, web pages like news articles and social networks like Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, online transaction processing (OLTP databases, logs files (server activity), files used for business transactions processing, transactional e-mail systems such as those sending orders and invoices, online shops’ databases, etc. Structured Data is much easier to understand when you are reading it in a spreadsheet-like format.

What is Unstructured Data?

Unstructured data does not have fixed formats. Unstructured Data includes any data that is outside of Structured Data sets. This would include text stored with no structure (such as within word processing documents or PDFs) or images with no metadata (such as digital photos). Textual information that has “no intrinsic meaning” is also considered unstructured data.

Where Structured Data comes from already predefined Structures, the Information contained in Unstructured Data needs to be Structured before you can do anything with it.

To summarize: Unstructured Data

Unstructured data does not have fixed formats and contains information that is meant to be analyzed by humans rather than machines. This would include text stored with no structure (such as within word processing documents or PDFs) or images with no metadata (such as digital photos). Textual information that has “no intrinsic meaning” is also considered unstructured data. Structured Data sets are organized in tables, columns, and rows or records. Structured data comes from many sources including direct feeds of pre-existing databases, web pages like news articles and social networks like Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, online transaction processing (OLTP databases, logs files (server activity), files used for business transactions processing, transactional e-mail systems such as those sending orders and invoices, online shops’ databases, etc. Structured Data is much easier to understand when you are reading it in a spreadsheet-like format.