Counterpoint: Defining Big Data
About a month ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Big Data in Finance Day Chicago event at Microsoft Technology Center Chicago. One of my many observations was that it is apparent the industry has not agreed on a definition of "Big Data".The best definition that I have personally heard, apart from this event:
- "When the size of the data itself becomes part of the problem"
The speakers at this event gave several:
- "Any data set that is too big or too cumbersome to work with in Excel, or takes too long to calculate.
- "Any data set that has you asking yourself the question, 'Does this belong in Hadoop?"
- "Big Data = transactions + interactions + observations"
- "Big Data is not Hadoop"
The last definition listed above is not really a definition of Big Data, but I list it here because it seeks to define what Big Data is not, and sometimes it helps to provide a narrowing down of options, and it was clear from this event, as it is with so many vendors, that implementations of Hadoop go hand-in-hand with working with Big Data problems.
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