Big Data: Problem Scope and Solutions Overview

By Babar Khan

Companies have had data about their key stakeholders for as long as they have existed, more recently we have been applying technology to analytical to solve problems for as long as we've had computers, so what's new and what's different here? So the first question is, "how much data are we talking about?" and why is there a preface big. In 1979, Dr. Jack E. Shemer and Dr. Philip M. Neches formed Teradata, a name that represents the idea of unimaginably large amounts of data and the resulting value proposition is "this is what we are going to help our customers optimize on".

In 2008, WIRED magazine published an article titled "The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More—More Is Different" and so you begin to see that 28 years later, the prefix creep moves on and "terra" won't work anymore in the new normal with all this data being collected. Four years later, WIRED came out with another article on "The Exabyte Revolution" and the prefix's are marching up—this one didn't work for 28 years or 4 years or even one year—it worked for about 6 months because Cisco recently came out with a report on "The Zettabyte Era—Trends and Analysis" and its not even the scary part. There is only one more prefix in existence that can describe the next phase in big data and its called the Yottabyte, indicating a value of 10008.