Big data refers to the massive amounts of information created every day from various sources. Some key facts about big data include:
- Every two days now we create as much data as we did from the beginning of civilization until 2003.
- Technologies to handle big data must be able to process petabytes and exabytes of data from a variety of structured and unstructured sources in real-time.
- Analyzing big data can provide valuable insights into areas like smart cities, healthcare, retail and manufacturing by improving operations and decision making.
However, big data also presents challenges around its massive scale, rapid growth, heterogeneity and real-time processing requirements that differ from traditional data warehousing.