[GoodDreams]

A company I worked for defined big data as anything not analyzable with a relational database - a PDF or video was big data. Companies say they want the latest buzzword even though it’s against their own interest and other companies say “we can give that to you” and instead deliver something that is of actual value so the license gets renewed. Same thing happened with SOA, REST, microservices, blockchain. IBM developed a blockchain product just to get the sales conversations going and then sold something else. Imagine being on that product’s team.

[saalweachter]

I would go with "big data is when you have to spend more effort on the mechanism of performing the computation than on the details of the analysis itself."