Microsoft and “Big Data” - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 350

Note that O'Reilly Media sponsors the Strata conference ( http://strataconf.com ) , webcasts, topics,
and ongoing analysis and coverage, which help give the community a nuts-and-bolts understanding
required for building a data-driven business, product, or career. The Strata conference is the leading
event for the people and technology driving the data revolution. The home of data science, Strata
brings together practitioners, researchers, IT leaders and entrepreneurs to discuss Big Data, Hadoop,
analytics, visualization, and data markets.

What is Big Data?

“Big data is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database
systems. The data is too big, moves too fast, or doesn't fit the strictures of your
database architectures. To gain value from this data, you must choose an alternative
way to process it.” ( http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/01/what-is-big-data.html)

Other characteristics of what can be considered Big Data are the following:

Hundreds of terabytes, and even into petabytes of data

■

■ Data from financial services, sensors, web logs (data that describes user behavior on the web),
social media, and so on

Processing of data sets too large for transactional databases for which you are analyzing inter-
actions rather than transactions

■

Cost-effective approaches are working to tame volume, velocity, and variability of massive data.

Volume
Today, everything is either connected to the Internet or someone is in the process of figuring out how
to make the connection—from phones to televisions to satellites as well as social networking and
cloud data. The amount of machine-generated data available for trend analysis is approaching the
exabyte and zetabyte range. A zetabyte is a quantity of information or information storage capacity
equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or about one billion terabytes. As of April 2012, no
storage system has achieved one zetabyte of information. Data volume is growing by 10 times every 5
years, According to a recent International Data Corporation (IDC) report, the volume of digital records
is forecast to hit 1 to 2 million zetabytes this year, and it is predicted to grow 44 times over the next
decade.

IDC reports that 90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years. Gartner
projects that the volume of information is growing at an annual rate of 59 percent worldwide (“Big
Data, the Next Oil?” [ http://www.utopiainc.com/insights/big-data ] ).

To put it in plain, unvarnished terms, the volume of data is increasing.