So what exactly is Big Data?

In the real world view, Big Data is the culmination of several years’ worth of data that your company has stored in their data warehouse as instructed by their DBA since, well, forever. This data that has been archived in different locations for safe keeping, and possible later use, is extremely valuable for marketing, sales and other decision makers in your organization.

The official Wiki definition of Big Data is: “a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization.” You will see that definition used in a lot of places.