In both cases, you are upgrading an individual content database. NOTE: If you try to restore the content database (normally you do this on a backup of the content database) twice to the same farm it will fail because SharePoint doesn’t allow two site collections with the same GUID
However, in almost every case, the term structured data can be simply replaced by the term “database data” as this describes the format and presentation requirements of this information
There's even some hard, tangible directionals on configuring servers (64 bit or bust), application upgrade paths (nothing less than SQL 2008 please) and compliance with upgrade requirements (gotta run those pre-upgrade checks to ensnare those database orphans)!
For that there’s an entire gift shop of gold certified vendors who write code designed to backfill SharePoint’s inability to present or instigate an enterprise level view of your Content Database
Leave the content in its current systems, but aggregate meta data: Also referred to as “federated” content management, this approach provides a virtual “view” of content via a single “parent” database, with pointers to the native resources spread across the enterprise in “child” repositories. This approach presents many appealing benefits – e.g. no need to move content – but accessing the applications will still require re-writing to query the new “parent” database
There are times when there does need to me additional high level containers be it a root folder, site collection, site, library, cabinet, database, whatever you want to call it
John was one of the founding engineers at Ingres® where he helped develop the world's first commercial relational database
On the other side, ECM solutions and repositories have become as pervasive as databases, and we are experiencing, like in the late 80s for the database market, a healthy consolidation of ECM repositories, thanks in part to the emergence of standards
Accuracy can also be further increased through improved practices in form design and preparation, context and sensitivity, database cross validation, and other techniques
Big data is much more about the breadth of the analysis and the insights that can be achieved than it is about the size of the data and the underlying database technology. -- Here are a couple other resources that might be of interest to you