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by eliben 4748 days ago
I find the use of the term "Big Data" there bullshit. Even for the largest company like Walmart with 2 million employees - having some data about every one is hardly "big". Collect a whole deluge of data about each and you hardly fill a USB drive.

I realize that reporters like to throw buzzwords into anything to cater to the "simpler" readers. But come one, this is outright silly.
2 comments
ap22213 4748 days ago
I don't know, I'm starting to change my opinion of this. I used to think 'big data' meant anything that didn't fit easily into a RDBMS. At least petabytes.

But, more recently, in conversations with non-programmers, I see that 'big data' to them, means 'broad data' - it means trying to track everything possible and make sense of it. The average business user is really excited to be able to cross-relate disparate types of data - in an effort to make things better. 'Big data' enables the breaking down silos and enabling of cross references. It's about making empirical decisions based on data rather than opinion or intuition. That's really good, in my opinion.

So, 'big data' in that way is more amorphous than just the size of the data. With services and networks, the question becomes where does the data begin and end? Big data is potentially everything.

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eliben 4748 days ago
If you're right then it's a sad situation. I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.
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plorkyeran 4748 days ago
In this case at least the meaning it's drifting towards still actually means something rather than just a meaningless buzzword.
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Helianthus 4748 days ago
Just wait until Big Data is referred to similarly to Big Oil...
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Thrymr 4748 days ago
> I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.

That's how language has always worked. There are people who are still uptight by the current "misuse" of words like "awesome" and "hopeful", but those of us who grew up with different meanings in common usage mostly just shrug.

For technical terms, usually I can live with words having domain-specific meaning that differs from common usage, but "theory" is one I still can't get over. It causes too much miscommunication.

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chaz 4748 days ago
Walmart's DW was 2.5 petabytes in 2008; undoubtedly larger now. Rumor had it that they were storing every line item from every POS receipt since the early 90s, but they probably don't have all that data online. I would think it needs to contain POS data, SKU inventory and sales at every store and distribution center, tracking of vendors, orders, shipments, truck logistics, etc. Even weather reports (remember how they predicted Poptarts would sell more when hurricanes were forecast?).

eBay has a 9 petabyte DW that cuts across all of the types of data on their whole site: listings, bids, feedback, categories, clicks, etc.

Sometimes big data is actually big data, both in terms of raw size as well as complexity.

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/27/why-apple-ebay-and-walmart-have...

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