Big data is a general term used to describe the voluminous amount of unstructured and semi-structured data a company creates - data that would take too much time and cost too much money to load into a relational database for analysis. Although Big data doesn't refer to any specific quantity, the term is often used when speaking about petabytes and exabytes of data
Turn your spreadsheets into pie charts, maps and more with these handy tools. Big data is abuzz in the technology sector right now, but nobody is quite sure how to take advantage of it. While vendors talk up the benefits of collecting reams of data, it is less clear how you will turn it into useful business intelligence.