Big data existed long before the phrase was invented. For instance, banks and stock exchanges have been processing billions of transactions daily for years and airline companies have worldwide real-time infrastructures for operational management of passenger booking, and so on. So, what is big data really? Doug Laney (2001) suggested that big data is defined by three Vs: volume, velocity, and variety. Therefore, to answer the question of whether your data is big, we can translate this into the following three sub-questions:
- Volume: Can you store your data in memory?
- Velocity: Can you process new incoming data with a single machine?
- Variety: Is your data from a single source?
If you answered all of these questions with ...
