This document compares and contrasts data warehouses and big data. It discusses how big data has evolved from data warehousing technologies and involves new technologies like Hadoop and MapReduce. While data warehouses ensure consistent decision making using prior hypotheses, big data uses statistics to extract new hypotheses from very large and diverse datasets, including clickstream logs, sensor data, social media, and more. Both hard and soft data sources are important for businesses to analyze and extract value from immense and growing amounts of information.