What is Big Data ?

Big data is an evolving term that describes any voluminous amountofstructured, semi-structured and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information.Big data can be characterized by 3Vs: the extreme volume of data, the wide variety of types of data and the velocity at which the data must bemust processed. Although big data doesn’t refer to any specific quantity, the term is often used when speaking about petabytes andexabytes of data, much of which cannot be integrated easily.Because big data takes too much time and costs too much money to load into a traditional relational database for analysis, new approaches to storing and analyzing data have emerged that rely less on data schema and data quality. Instead, raw data with extended metadata is aggregated in a data lake and machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) programs use complex algorithms to look for repeatable patterns.Big data analytics is often associated with cloud computing because the analysis of large data sets in real-time requires a platform like Hadoop to store large data sets across a distributed cluster and MapReduce to coordinate, combine and process data from multiple sources.(source: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/big-data-Big-Data)