07-09-2014, 10:24 PM
"Big data" is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big Data is a general term used to describe the voluminous amount of unstructured and semi-structured data a company creates data that would take too much time, cost and money to load into a relational database for analysis. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set. Although big data doesn't refer to any specific quantity, the term is often used when speaking about petabytes and exabytes of data. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data. Big data means immense amount of data, so much so that it is difficult to collect, store, manage, and analyze via general database software.