e Mother of Invention’s Triplets • 61
happy customers, and YouTube demonstrations are all valuable sources of
data. All of these defy attempts to load them into standard database tables.
e three Vs illuminate big data and its characteristics, but they fall far
short of a formal denition. e reason for the popularity of the three Vs
is probably due in large part to this tendency of big data to elude a rm
denition that encapsulates its diverse characteristics.
A 2011 paper by the McKinsey Global Institute describes big data thus:
“Big data” refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical data-
base soware tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze. is denition
is intentionally subjective and incorporates a moving denit