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Structured vs Unstructured vs Semi-Structured Data

Understanding the difference between structured, semi-structured and unstructured data

Giorgos Myrianthous
Level Up Coding
4 min readFeb 28, 2022

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Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

Introduction

It is estimated that more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were generated only in 2021 while more than 79 zettabytes of data were consumed (source: Statista) while these numbers are growing exponentially every year. But one question you may have is what do we really mean when referring to the term data?

Data comes in different types; from spreadsheets, to text and video or even audio files. In today’s article we will discuss about the main differences between structured, unstructured and semi-structured data and give some real-world examples. Additionally, we will discuss about where each data type is supposed to be stored within the organisation in order to establish and maintain a proper data management strategy.

Structured Data

Structured data is a type of data that is expected to have some predefined sort of structure prior to being stored to storage means. This structure is often referred to as a schema-on-write.

This type of data can either be human or machine generated. The simplest example of structured data is a spreadsheet created by an analyst…

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Written by Giorgos Myrianthous

I strive to build data-intensive systems that are not only functional, but also scalable, cost effective and maintainable over the long term.

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