[thebigpicture]

Thank you MS Research for a dose of sanity. "Big data" seems very potent as far as marketing buzzwords go. It plays on people's ignorance and the general sentiment of "too much information".

I'll be keeping this pdf in my "rebuttals to idiocy" folder.

There are some industries that certainly have do have "big data" (Wikipedia has some definitions for "big data" that include size ranges for whatever that's worth) but it does not seem like companies with "big data" are the only targets of "big data" marketing. And from what I know about available solutions, if I really had a "big data" problem (e.g., 100 terabytes not 100 gigabytes) then I would not be choosing Hadoop. I also would not choose SQL or "NoSQL". But that's just me. Some of the best solutions I've found have nearly zero marketing. Go figure.