The volume of data now being stored by businesses is at a point where the term "big data" almost feels inadequate to describe it. The size of big data sets is a constantly moving target, ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set. And it is estimated that, over the next 2 years, the total amount of big data stored by business will be four times today's volumes. As business continues its inexorable shift to the cloud, weblogs continue to fuel the big data fire. But there are plenty of other sources as well - RFID, sensor networks, social networks, social, Internet text and documents, Internet search indexing, call detail records, scientific research, military surveillance, medical records, photography archives, video archives, and large-scale e-commerce transaction records.
Posted July 25, 2012