The concept of Big Data refers to enormous data sets, sets of sizes where you need data warehouses to store it, where you typically need sophisticated algorithms to handle the data and distributed computations to get anywhere with it. At the very least, we talk many gigabytes of data but also often terabytes or exabytes.
Dealing with Big Data is also part of data science, but it is beyond the scope of this book. This chapter is on large data sets and how to deal with data that slows down your analysis, but it is not about data sets so large that you cannot analyze it on your desktop ...
