Big Data Bootcamp: What Managers Need to Know to Profit from the Big Data Revolution

CHAPTER 1

Big Data

What It Is, and Why You Should Care

Scour the Internet and you’ll find dozens of definitions of Big Data. There are the three v’s—volume, variety, and velocity. And there are the more ­technical definitions, like this one from Edd Dumbill, analyst at O’Reilly Media: “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.”¹

Such definitions, while accurate, miss the true value of Big Data. Big Data should be measured by the size of its impact, not by the amount of storage space or processing power that it consumes. ...