What does Big Data mean?

That really is a good question.


Maybe a short definition of "Big Data" could be the following:

Big Data is data that you can hardly manage to collect, store, process or analyse with conventional relational database systems (RDBMS), because of its sheer amount and rapid growing. Known RDBMS can handle millions to billions of records, when they are well configured and strongly supported by powerful hardware, on which they run. But they usually scale badly and require strong investments, especially in hardware. A doubling of hardware resources usually does not mean a doubling of data processing capabilities. Today's businesses require analytics and reports in shorter time frames based on constantly growing datasets.

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